The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Spike Solutions

AUDIENCE

Programmers

We perform small, isolated experiments to inform our decisions.

You’ve probably noticed how much Agile teams value concrete data over speculation. Whenever you’re faced with a question, don’t speculate about the answer—conduct an experiment! Figure out how you can use real data to make progress.

That’s what spike solutions are for, too. A spike solution, or spike, is a technical investigation. It’s a small experiment, in code, to research the answer to a problem. It usually takes less than a day. When you have the answer, the spike is discarded.

NOTE

People often confuse spike solutions with walking skeletons: bare-bones code that demonstrates an idea from end-to-end. It’s the beginnings of a production implementation. In contrast, a spike is narrowly focused on a specific technical problem, and it’s thrown away afterward.

Spike solutions use code because nothing is more concrete. You can read as many books, tutorials, or online answers as you like, but to truly understand a solution, write working code. It’s important to work from a practical point of view, not just a theoretical one. The best way to do so depends on what you want to learn.

Quick Questions

For questions about your language, libraries, or tools, write a line or two of code. If your programming language has a REPL (an interactive programming prompt), that’s often the quickest way to get your answer. For example, if you wanted to know if JavaScript could use comparison operators ...