How to deal with unknown technologies and research tasks in an Agile project. From AgileWarsaw, June 14, 2010

3. Unknown technologies and research

4. Spikes in XP

5. Spikes in my team

6. Spikes in another team

7. Spikes in your teams?

9. Redesign and scaling-out of the server-side infrastructure of the biggest polish instant messenger (over 2M peak concurrent users)

10. 3 years, a small team of developers

11. Scrum after half a year

12. R&D project

14. How many of you develop the code?

15. How many of you lead your teams?

16. How many of you heard of spikes?

18. Daily face-to-face designing

19. No change-hampering documents

20. But...

21. … life tends to get more complicated

23. to learn something about the subject first

25. the research time estimation?

26. the output of the research?

28. These solutions are used for estimation and discarded once everyone gets clear visualization of the problem.

31. Decision-making session

32. List of questions to be answered

33. Design sketch

35. Three day-long two-people spikes per sprint

36. No backlog item for spikes

38. available domain experts

39. interfacing team members

42. Sometimes needed some ad-hoc modifications

45. Estimated within focus factor – the same amount of research work every sprint

46. The need to facilitate the spike meeting

48. People from other teams help with the quality...

49. … and spread the info about the interesting things going on within the team

53. Discuss with relevant people A, B

57. The time for this meeting included in the sprint time consumption estimates

60. In a holiday season

61. Analysis before the actual project start

64. Decision-making session

65. List of questions to be answered

66. Design sketch

68. http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/spike.html

69. http://blog.agilebuddy.com/2009/11/what-is-a-spike-in-scrum.html

70. More discussion?

72. Let the informal session start.

74. Working software over comprehensive documentation

75. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

76. Responding to change over following a plan

77. That is,

78. while there is value in the items on the right,

79. we value the items on the left more.