AgileWarsaw: Spikes

Spikes
Mateusz Srebrny < [email_address] > Agile Warsaw June 14, 2010

Overview
Introduction
Unknown technologies and research
Spikes in XP
Spikes in my team
Spikes in another team
Spikes in your teams?

Introduction
Non-coding scrum master
Redesign and scaling-out of the server-side infrastructure of the biggest polish instant messenger (over 2M peak concurrent users)
3 years, a small team of developers
Scrum after half a year
R&D project

And you?
How many of you work in an Agile way?
How many of you develop the code?
How many of you lead your teams?
How many of you heard of spikes?

Agile design ideals
Architecture magically emerges
Daily face-to-face designing
No change-hampering documents
But...
… life tends to get more complicated

Unknown technologies and research
Sometimes you need:
to choose between two new technologies
to learn something about the subject first
to do something extremely unique
Problems:
research takes a lot of time
the research time estimation?
the output of the research?

Spikes and XP
XP @ wikipedia:
Development can also create spike solutions to analyse or solve the problem.
These solutions are used for estimation and discarded once everyone gets clear visualization of the problem.

My spike understanding
Put a time-box around research task
Specify the required output:
Working prototype
Decision-making session
List of questions to be answered
Design sketch

Spikes in my team
Backlog items preplanned for two, three sprints
Three day-long two-people spikes per sprint
No backlog item for spikes
The output – team meeting with interested parties
Product Owners
available domain experts
interfacing team members

Spikes in my team – spike meetings
Research details
Usually a couple of options for implementation
Sometimes ready to implement
Sometimes needed some ad-hoc modifications
Sometimes needed another spike
Never failed to deliver something of value

Spikes in my team – summary
Never more than three spikes on a subject
Estimated within focus factor – the same amount of research work every sprint
The need to facilitate the spike meeting
Bonus value:
Inclusion of less experienced in the research
People from other teams help with the quality...
… and spread the info about the interesting things going on within the team

Spikes in my team – discussion
What do you think?

Spikes in another team
Research backlog item – 'X – analysis'
The research tasks:
Check up technologies Y, Z
Discuss with relevant people A, B
Produce a proof of concept
Estimation just like with other backlog items

Spikes in another team - meeting
After the research tasks were completed – a meeting of all involved developers
Meeting goal:
Break-up the researched feature into development tasks
The development tasks presented during a sprint planning session
The time for this meeting included in the sprint time consumption estimates

Spikes in another team - discussion
What do you think?

Research outside the sprint
There was some research done without spikes
By a new team member
In a holiday season
Analysis before the actual project start

My spike understanding
Put a time-box around research task
Specify the required output:
Working prototype
Decision-making session
List of questions to be answered
Design sketch

Reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming_practices
http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/spike.html
http://blog.agilebuddy.com/2009/11/what-is-a-spike-in-scrum.html
More discussion?

:)
Thank you.
Let the informal session start.

Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is,
while there is value in the items on the right,
we value the items on the left more.

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AgileWarsaw: Spikes

by Mateusz Srebrny on Jun 15, 2010

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