Article summary
You’ve just picked up a new card for a spike! It’s not quite a new feature, maybe it’s not the work you want to do to forge a new path ahead. However, spike work can be critical to laying a safe path forward. A whole new world lies ahead, full of new challenges and ideas.
Picking Up a Spike Card
Maybe this card is big and daunting, with paragraphs of information and detailed lists on what questions you need to answer. The list of people involved is just the list of people on your team. Everyone wants to know the result of this spike.
Maybe it’s the other way, two measly sentences that say, “Can we do this? Go find out.” There are no suggestions on how much time you should spend on it, or how broad your search should be. Either way, there’s a whole lot of Unknown ahead of you, and you’re absolutely lost. It’s dangerous to go alone!
Potential Opponents
Well, sometimes it can be dangerous. Plenty of pitfalls may lead you to consider asking for help. It’s easy to get stuck in your own head when reading technical documentation, digging through layers of abstraction until you can’t remember why you’re here.
You could get stuck when something you’re trying does not work. It’s possible here to waste effort attempting implementation details that aren’t needed at this point. The reading available to you lends no help (or worse, the dreaded unanswered question on Stack Overflow that describes your problem to a T).
It’s also important to understand the scope of the work clearly. That spike card with only two sentences? It’s not a narrow enough scope for you to be able to give a concrete answer. It also does not give enough perspective into the user story behind the card. Times like this it can be better to break spikes into narrowly defined blocks.
This is where I found myself on a recent spike card. I could not get the PDF to generate with data in the fillable fields for the life of me. It was hopeless until I brought in a partner.
Danger!
Pair partners, as you may well know, can bring new perspectives and ideas to your work. We often ask for a pair when we’re stuck, but it can be important to bring one along when doing spike cards. Especially when trying new implementations and techniques.
It’s helpful to have someone give you the gut-check. The reminder to come up out of the research depths for air, and to remember what you’re trying to accomplish. This could be your tech lead, who can point you to plausible libraries that are worth researching. It could also be your UX teammate, who can give you context about how your spike work will affect the user. It can also be helpful to have someone to give you a new perspective, no matter how much or how little expertise they have in a given area.
Or in the case of my stuck PDF work, it can be helpful to have someone to talk to about what’s going on. Turns out the issue I was facing was a browser issue. Once I switched my testing to the Client’s desired browser, it worked like a charm. I had assumed that the issue was with the spike work itself, and not with something unrelated!
Have you ever gotten stuck in uncharted territory? Do you think that having a pair to talk to would have helped? Or, would they have been an unwelcome audience to your struggle?