Elena Yatzeck shares in this blog post her thoughts about “value spike”. A “spike” is a short piece of work within an agile project in which one or two programmers may be assigned to do outside of the iteration structure. The goal is to investigates unknown technology problems well enough so you can estimate them. In the same intent, a “value spike” is time that the Product Owner takes to assemble the right Subject Matter Experts (SME) for a meeting to determine the authorship and impact of a requirement whose value seems questionable. The PO can come bakc with a fresh view of the value of the feature and perform a new cost/benefit analysis.
