Spike Tickets (WIP)

This page is mostly speculative thoughts on how to handle spikes within the internal admin team, and is not necessarily “policy” . . . yet . . .

When creating a spike ticket in Jira, we currently use the Story template. There are some differences between a spike and a “normal” Story ticket.

The following guide is based on the assumption that the spike has been generated during the refining of an existing ticket.

Ticket Creation - Create a ticket and set it as "split from" its parent ticket. Ensure the title starts with “Spike:”
User Story - The user story for a spike is the same as the user story that generated a spike.
Acceptance Criteria - The given/when/then pattern doesn’t necessarily fit here, because the criteria is always* "given we have a question, when we investigate, then we'll know the answer". Instead, write out explicit questions to be answered. Once these questions are answered, the spike ticket is complete.
Estimation of Effort - The “Effort” options of S/M/L are not appropriate for a spike instead, write out a “Timebox” statement in the spike ticket’s description, e.g. Timebox: 1 day
Business value - Just as the user story for a spike is the same as the story that generated the spike, the business value of the spike is the same as the story that generated it. (Assuming that the spike is critical to the completion of the original story).