This article is a companion to my talk at GDC 2024, "Agile Spikes in Game Dev: Getting to the Point". You can get the slides here.
The meat of this article is presented in the two attached templates. If you download them and try them out, please leave a comment!
Alternatively, you can try Microsoft's much lighter template - but if you don't have much experience with Spikes it might be safer to start with the guard rails on.
The following is a very brief overview of what an Agile Spike is, and some links to further reading. There is a lot more information in the GDC talk (linked above).
What is a Spike?
As is the recent trend, I asked ChatGPT (instead of a dictionary) to provide a definition for what is an Agile Spike:
An Agile spike, often referred to simply as a "spike," is a time-boxed research or investigative activity conducted by Agile teams to gather information, answer a specific question, or mitigate a risk. It is a technique commonly used in Agile software development methodologies like Scrum or Extreme Programming (XP).
Not bad, ChatGPT! My own definition is this:
A spike is a short, reproducible, exploratory task to gain the knowledge you need to reduce the risk of a technical approach, better understand a requirement, or increase the reliability of a story estimate.
The key difference between mine and most other definitions is "reproducible". I find that it helps improve the quality of the spike reports, and help build a knowledge base that is more useful in a longer term.
Hopefully, the links below, the templates, and the above definitions help you all out with figuring out how to apply this to your own projects - and if all else fails, reach out, I'm always happy to answer questions.