Comparison
SpikevsTimebox
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 →Timebox
you agreed to spend two days on it and to come back with what you had, whatever that was.
Fixing the time and letting the scope or the outcome vary. It is the standard control for open-ended work — investigations, spikes, debugging, proofs of concept — because such work has no natural end and will absorb whatever it is given. The discipline is the ending: a timebox that is silently extended twice was never a timebox, it was a wish.
Full entry →