The Practice of Sizing Spikes with Story Points

Every once and a while it's good to take a tool out of it's box and find out if it's still fit for purpose. Maybe even find if it can be used in a new way. I recently did this with the practice of sizing spikes with story points. I've experienced a lot of different projects since last revisiting my thinking on this topic. So after doing a little research on current thinking, I updated an old set of slides and presented my position to a group of scrum masters to set the stage for a conversation. My position: Estimating spikes with story points is a vanity metric and teams are better served with spikes that are time-boxed but unsized.

While several colleagues came with an abundance of material to support their particular position, no one addressed the points I raised. So it was a wash. My position hasn't changed appreciably. But I did gain from hearing several arguments for how spikes could be used more effectively if they were to be sized with story points. And perhaps the feedback from this article will further evolve my thinking on the subject.