Spike

A spike is research the team deems necessary before they can correctly estimate a user story. Spikes do not result in shippable product. We time-box our spikes to ensure we cut off this research if it hasn't yielded the answers or information it sought within a certain amount of time. If the research doesn't yield the needed answers in the agreed-upon amount of time, we bring the spike back before the team for re-evaluation.

We do not put story points on spike, since story points represent relative size of work and not time. We also don't want points on spikes because we want story points to represent value delivered to our customer.