Spike stories - estimation and acceptance criteria ?

[Ram Srinivasan]

Hello Folks,

My understanding is that there are 2 types of spikes - technical and functional.  And that spike stories need not have an estimate (as they are time boxed to 1-2 days), and cannot be estimated (in story points), because it is research work, if we know what to do, we would build the feature and not do a spike.  Is my understanding correct? 

Does Ron's 3Cs (Card, Confirmation, Conversation) apply to spike stories as well? Common sense tells me yes, and there is no harm. The acceptance criteria  for a technical spike may be something like  "the DB should be able to support 500K transactions without locking tables". Sometimes it may not be possible to have acceptance criteria, its research work, you are investigating it. I was looking at c2.com and xp123.com, but I could not find relevant material which could confirm my understanding

Thanks,

Ram

[Pierre Neis]

Estimating Spikes without COAs is the solution that I use to apply!

COAs for Spike doesn't really makes sense, Spikes are mainly linked to research activities.

Regarding estimation it's a bit more tricky:

- estimate a spike makes in an engineering POV no sense

- what happens if you/your team consumes 50% of capacity/time on Spikes during a Sprint?

I like to introduce Spike estimation as a team discussion. The outcome of this is mainly a better understanding at team level and in the meantime the scrum master can grab some additional Story points for burndown and (s)he document it as decreasing TechDebt (or TechDebt in depends how you use this term).

 Results: reduced debate with management at Review, increased knowledge sharing helps estimation

Kind regards, cordialement, mit freundlichen Grüssen,

Pierre E. Neis, psm, cspo, csp 
Scrum/Lean Coach - Scrum Master @ Lumension Security



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Contact me: pierre.neis

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