Comparison
Proof of conceptvsSpike
Proof of concept
you demoed the working prototype and someone asked when it could go live, which was never the plan.
A deliberately incomplete build that shows an approach can work. It skips error handling, security, scale and edge cases on purpose, and its greatest danger is its own success — a convincing demo creates pressure to ship the thing that was never built to be shipped. Say what it omits at the same moment you show it, in the same sentence, every time.
Full entry →Spike
you spent two days finding out whether the library could do it at all, and threw the code away.
A timeboxed piece of work whose only deliverable is an answer to a question. The code is explicitly disposable, which is the part teams get wrong when a spike quietly becomes the foundation of the feature. It is the standard tool against a known unknown, and the discipline is the timebox: a spike without an end date is just an unplanned project.
Full entry →