Spike assessment

This section is under development

Many analysis problems have a narrow scope and they appear either only once or sporadically in different shapes. These are the realm of spike assessment.

Spike assessment is meant to provide a fast answer to a technical problem. Examples of such problems can be:

• Where is this component used in the system?
• From where in the code is a certain database table accessed?
• Are there calls to a service that are not guarded by error checks or by authentication?
• Which entities from the domain model are not annotated with a certain required meta-data?

A spike assessment is usually measured in minutes or hours of work. If it takes significantly longer, you are probably approaching the problem in the wrong way. Set up a time-box and stick to it.

Answering the question often requires customized tools. During spike assessments only build throwaway analysis tools. Build them aggressively. They do not have to be elegant. They have to effective.

The goal is to find the answer to the question as fast as possible. Once you find it, you might consider evaluating the experience and investing in a tooling buildup, but not at first.