Agile Know-How Magazine • Fall 2017
Studio Pyxis
Studio Pyxis was born with the
mission of offering singular, high-quality
solutions that meet its clients’ real needs.
It is first a place of creation intended for
custom software development for clients
looking for unique solutions and who want
to maximize their investment’s value.
For more than sixteen years, our develop-
ment team has demonstrated its Agility, its
creativity, its collaborative spirit, and its
unfailing engagement toward its clients and
partners’ success. Our promise is to quickly
deliver software that delights in all respects,
to support it, and make it evolve frequently
according to changing needs.
Studio has also developed its own products.
Among those, you can find project and time
sheet management software: Urban Turtle
and Talia.
We now wish to introduce you to one of
our developers: Christian Bélisle. Christian
discovered Agility in 2006 through training
provided by Pyxis, and it quickly became a
passion. He is constantly looking for the best
work methods, be they technical or organi-
zational. In this article, Christian talks about
Agile architecture.
pyxis-studio.com :
Spikes and
emergent
design
Christian Bélisle, Agile Developer
T
here is a technique, initially introduced by the Extre-
me Programming movement, which consists in adding an
element to the product backlog that we call a “spike.” The
team agrees on a limit of time to be invested in this item. The
goal is to acquire the knowledge necessary to reduce the risk,
understand a requirement, or improve accuracy when
estimating another backlog item.
There are two types of spikes: technical and functional.
Functional spikes mainly help to better understand a required
behaviour of the application in order to be able to break it
down more efficiently or simply to acquire the tools necessary
to make better implementation decisions. Technical spikes
help to better understand the technology in order to deter-
mine the feasibility and impact of certain implementations
that need to be done.
Spikes are used in different situations:
• To analyze the affected behaviour to better break down
the tasks and make estimates more easily;
• To analyze the feasibility and determine the viability of
46
agileknowhow.com