The Benefits of Agile Spikes
Using spike stories to build business cases, align on capabilities, and remove external dependencies
How do you turn requirements into action? For many agile teams, using spike stories is an effective way to progress strategically without getting slowed down by external dependencies.
Agile spike stories, or “spikes,” are time-boxed user stories that are free of inter-team dependencies. They not only help investigate facts, but also highlight value drivers and create alignment within teams, removing potential impediments prior to undertaking any work.
Agile success is dependent on team members collaborating and showing a bias for action. When agile organizations bolster team user stories with broader programs like objectives and key results (OKRs) or V2MOM (vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measurements), this alignment greatly boosts the agility of dependent teams.
By highlighting common goals and values, spikes can create alignment within teams, much like OKRs or V2MOM programs. Once spikes produce insights into user-centric requirements, teams can apply the results to the user stories, allowing them to move forward.
When there aren’t shared objectives and high-level goals across the enterprise, teams are left to prioritize work that’s out of context while product owners compete for resources. This dependency on teams with disparate value drivers leads to blocked work by factors that are often outside their sphere of control. However, agile spikes are a valuable tool to overcome these dependencies. By aligning with external teams, agile product owners can prioritize backlogged “spike stories” to investigate these value drivers. This builds a robust, cross-team business case and creates alignment between interdependent teams, ultimately converting impediments into partnerships.
Site reliability (SRE) teams are a great example of this. In the absence of development access to applications or systems, SRE teams are tasked with improving reliability without the access to update what’s actually being improved. With OKRs or V2MOM programs, enterprises expedite this work by imposing responsibilities for improvements across dependent teams and ensuring consistent prioritization of dependent work.
Without these programs, application teams often de-prioritize SRE-enabling work and reliability teams struggle to encourage cooperation. Instead of waiting for management chains to leverage political weight or abandon SRE programs in the face of missed deadlines and underperformance, agile SRE product owners should remember to use spikes to build support, boost priorities, and move initiatives forward, one value driver at a time.
In summary, declaring defeat and missing deadlines is not agile. Spikes help build robust business cases and always have a place on agile team backlogs. When used strategically, they can help teams move forward, unimpeded.
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