[dymk]

Maybe a spike takes a week. Maybe a spike takes an hour. I can't estimate that.

Which would be fine, but then management or the PM expects me to loop back around when a spike is complete. I'd rather just continue engineering a solution when I'm done investigating, which is the natural progression of things.

I'd rather treat {get requirements, investigate, implement, debug, deploy} as a single atomic task, rather than splitting it across N meetings for planning the sprint, planning the spike, meeting with the PM for more requirements they forgot to put in the user story, describing it at a retrospective, showing it at a demo.

Now I know somebody will say "But that's now how agile works!". Well, we have a few agile "coaches" that were embedded in our teams who would disagree.

[nprateem]

What are you doing in a spike? If you can't work out after a day the rough complexity of the task (bearing in mind you should be working on a small deliverable) there's something seriously wrong. You're not meant to be doing the work in the spike. If your research spike shows that it could be a can of worms, then the outcome of it should be another ticket for a proof-of-concept for another sprint, but with specific goals (e.g. "get a POC working that does X, Y & Z").

[theptip]

> Maybe a spike takes a week. Maybe a spike takes an hour. I can't estimate that.

Timebox it then! If you think the spike is going to take a day, and it turns out you'd need a week to even get the prototype working, then that's a successful spike -- you dramatically increased the lower bound on your estimate.

(Sadly by the asymmetry of estimation it seldom happens that you think it's going to take 5d and it ends up taking just 1d).

[matwood]

> Which would be fine, but then management or the PM expects me to loop back around when a spike is complete. I'd rather just continue engineering a solution when I'm done investigating, which is the natural progression of things.

This has nothing to do with agile. Feature X may sound great if it takes 2 weeks, but if it takes 6 months I may not consider it worthwhile right now. Engineering is not just about building something, but dealing with constraints like time and cost.