A critical review of the use of spikes in agile software development
Hussein Al Hashimi, Andrew M. Gravell · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2019
Spikes can be an essential component in the agile development cycle since they assist teams in both technical and functional issues in order to obtain the information required to reduce technical risk, understand requirements or enhance the accuracy of a story estimate. Spike is a time-boxed activity to explore and investigate a significant uncertainty and various technical approaches in order to obtain a demonstrable and estimable user story. This paper reviews the uses of spikes through findings in different software development domains to showcase the implementation of spikes in agile software development and their impact on the understanding, consistency, and reliability of the story estimate. The paper provides a critical review of the use of spikes in various software projects and it concludes that limited studies have been conducted on the use of spikes in different software development domains.