Are you sure you want to spike that?
I have recently had some conversations about when it is appropriate to create a spike in Scrum. Is it when a team doesn't know how to approach a story? When they don't know how to utilize a tool or resource? When they have a question that they want to answer? Something else? I thought this would be a good time to dig into what a spike is, and what it isn't. The term spike comes from XP ( Kent Beck's Extreme Programming ) ( Spike | The Agile Dictionary ) . A spike, paraphrasing Ward Cunningham , should be a story that can convince the team that they are (or aren’t) on the right track. One of the primary use cases of a spike is to help a team when they have a story that they are unable to estimate its size. Some stories are initially inestimable because there are questions that need to be resolved first. For example, the team may not know if a technology is appropriate; will it handle the expected load? In this case the team should create a spike. Inversely, if