A redditor started a discussion about Spikes:

Question#

Should a really big story be allowed in the sprint?

I am a scrum master of 2 teams, but function as a guest advisor for a small 3rd team(who don’t have a dedicated SM), which is where this happend.

Today they had their planning and came to the planning with a story that was about 2 times the entire team’s velocity in terms of job size, a big part was due to the uncertainty of the story (its a big performance improvement they don’t know how easy its going to be fixed, and it couldn’t be split). They wanted to put it in the sprint knowing it was more than likely not going to be finished in this sprint. None of the product managers bothered to show up to disagree or object to it.

I decide to be okay with it due to believing it was probably Chaos in the Stacey Complexity model and Agile probably wasn’t the right method for this anyway. But if we didn’t start a sprint, management would be upset. I told them they should probably fairly evaluate if they atleast put in the amount of effort they expected to put into it the coming sprint. And I believe an idea is worth trying, even if it seems strange and “against” scrum.

I’m going to sit with them at the end of the sprint and see how this “experiment” turned out.

Should I have acted differently? would you?

I shared a story of my team#

Don’t do spikes and don’t try to force the problem into the framework. It looks like scrum is the issue here. Just skip scrum for an iteration and focus on solving the problem.

My previous team went down this path. After some changes in goals, we couldn’t plan a 2‑week iteration anymore. Our plan became useless after only 2 or 3 days. During a daily meeting someone raised this issue, we started a discussion, and the team decided to plan daily. We still had a goal and knew what needed to be done, but the work itself was completely chaotic. Instead of trying to form the sprint goal and guess what we could deliver in a sprint, we began inspecting and adapting every day or even more often. We had the goal without artificial cadence, story points, or any of that unnecessary stuff. It worked for us!

Is it the right solution for your problem? I don’t know. Maybe. That’s on you. I just wanted to share my story.

BTW, we never went back to scrum after that experiment. Everything suddenly became so much easier. You have a goal, and the whole team works together, doing their best to deliver it. If the goal is big, you break it into smaller parts. The daily meeting becomes actual planning, as it should be. There’s no fake deadline at the end of a sprint. You just focus on the most important thing and do it together. In my team, mob and pair programming were quite popular. I really miss these days.