Spiking for Success: Using Spikes in Agile Planning

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile  

In agile development, teams are often confronted with uncertainty and unknowns that can block progress. These could be technical challenges, unclear requirements, lack of data or research about customer needs, or really any of a number of things that can make planning difficult.

While agile embraces uncertainty, too many unknowns can make planning difficult. It can be frustrating to the team to be held back from progress due to having too many unknowns. It’s usually best to tackle the unknowns and help unblock the team as quickly as possible.

Agile solves this with a concept called a “spike.” A spike is a time-boxed task that seeks to help remove uncertainty and provides a basis for the team to create a better plan, both about what to build and how to build it.

Unlike a user story, which is meant to be delivered to customers and provide some measure of value, a spike is a supporting task that enables future value to be created. A spike can include things like a proof of concept, user research, or simply an experiment to follow up on an idea the team has. The goal of a spike is to reduce ambiguity enough such that progress can be made, keeping in mind that it’s usually impossible to eliminate all ambiguity.

Spikes are particularly useful when the team is faced with something new—either a new technology that they are attempting to use, or…

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