Handling spikes

[Nathan...@l-3com.com]

Does anyone have a recommended method for handling spikes with Agilo?

 

We have tried a couple things and I'm not real happy with any of them:

 

1) We tried creating spike tasks (or a special spike ticket - seems about the same), but there was no good way to quickly see which user stories in our backlog were spiked when we went this route.

2) We are currently marking our user stories as spiked (by prefixing the user story itself with "[SPIKE]". This has been fine for the most part especially when the investigation for the spike can be assigned to our development team (sometimes we assign the research to someone not on the development team who is more knowledgeable about the question - and thus our development capacity remains intact). I'm not completely comfortable with this approach though, in part because the spiked story is now in my sprint backlog and secondly because I want the research to resolve the spike to be able to have a time limit that is not necessarily tied to any particular sprint necessarily.

 

I'm open to going a completely different route than either of these, and would love to know if any of you have had success by other means.

 

Thanks,

Nathan Banek

[Martin Häcker]

Hi Nathan,

> I'm open to going a completely different route than either of these, and
> would love to know if any of you have had success by other means.

These are interesting ways to deal with the Spikes. We recommend to just
use a task for a spike, as it has a timebox attached (the estimation)
and no story points (spikes reduce your teams ammount to deliver
customer value, hence the 'spike' in your teams velocity).

I'd love to hear other community members way of dealing with spikes, so
please speak up!

Regards,
Martin