Driving a Technical Spike Using Behaviour Driven Development

Most Agile methodologies provide for the application of a Technical Spike for exploring a new technology or risky areas of a product. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology defines the Spike as a type of Exploration and Enabler Story.

There are a number of approaches that have been recommended for Technical Spikes. These include:

• Estimating and sizing a Technical Spike Story

• Timeboxing a Technical Spike .

The Technical Spike is exploratory in nature and it is conflicting to attempt to estimate the complexity for a piece of work that is not well understood; in my experience most teams would rather Timebox the efforts required to complete a Technical Spike.

Few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a developer that was mid-way into a spike and I had an ah-ha moment, and this post is an attempt to explain what might be an alternative approach to Technical Spikes.

I would suggest the Product Owner / Business Analyst in conjunction with a Technical member of the team e.g. Architect, Tech Lead define the high level requirements using the the Behaviour Driven Development Methodology.

Advantages of spec’ing the requirements / behavious upfront include the following:

• The goal for the spike is clearly defined upfront and as such the the developer is clear about what the deliverable is.

• The definition of DONE for the Technical Spike would be as soon as all Requirements spec’ed are met.

• Either the developer or a tester can automated the BDD script into executable requirements.

• The risk of spending too much time /efforts on the Technical Spike is minimised.

• A Baseline line of requirement for actual implementation evolves from the Technical Spike.

As with everything else, there isn’t a silver bullet but care must be taken not to go over board with the requirements. Being a Technical spike, there is a need to ensure that the requirement are at a very high level sufficient to describe the goals of the Technical Spike and it should not be prescriptive.

It seems to be working well for this project so feel free to try it out.

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