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Use spike to reduce the risk of a story or increase the reliability of an estimate
Spike is a term that comes from the Extreme Programming (XP) practice. The goal is reducing the risk of a technical problem or increase the reliability of a user story's estimate. The duration and objective(s) of a spike should be agreed between the Product Owner (PO) and ...
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An architectural spike is a fixed time/variable scope PBI which is added if the team feels that more investigation is needed in order to maximize velocity (or to get better estimates).
Practically, the spike consists in a series of investigations centered around finding solutions to one or more problems. It's not about writing code. The deliverable at the ...
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TL;DR
A research spike is intended to reduce the cone of uncertainty for future work. It is not intended to deliver shippable increments of anything. Treating the output of a spike as anything other than input to story planning/refinement is a Scrum implementation smell.
Time-Box Your Spikes
As an empirical control framework, Scrum is heavily reliant on ...
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I have been struggling with spikes as long as I've been a ScrumMaster. I'm finally starting to come to terms with them, and here's how:
The team is self-organizing. If they say they need a spike, I take them at their word.
We do not estimate spikes.
We set a goal of >70% stories per sprint, leaving <30% spikes. (This may seem ambiguous, as the ratio is ...
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The purpose of the limited timebox is to force the team to break down larger items into smaller ones. 2 weeks is a long time for research. I usually look for research tasks to be measured in hours, not days, let alone weeks. You may need to consider exactly what it is you are researching. Some common ways to approach this include:
In pure research, what ...
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