I am a big proponent of agile software development methods. The combination of software engineering discipline and lightweight project management processes has been very successful for many projects that I have been involved in. I tend to be a bit of a closet methodologist and I am very interested in the characteristics of different methodologies and successful implementation strategies. If you are looking for a good discussion of software engineering methodologies I recommend Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed.

The p&p group in general uses development practices inspired or adopted by the agile community. When implementing these techniques it is common to focus on the process and tooling when implementing agile practices. Often the relationship of the physical space to the effectiveness of the methodology and the productivity of the team is not a major concern. The team is generally forced into making ad-hoc modifications to their space configuration or settling for a “good enough” solution. Herding the team into a large conference room and buying snacks seems to be the common solution. Acquiring a shared resource like a conference room that is dedicated to a single project team requires painful justification with the facilities management.

Here at Microsoft the notion of one brain in one office has been enshrined as a central tenet of facilities planning and administration for 15 years. This is largely based on research around how an individual achieves the state of thinking called flow. Interruptions to flow are seen as the ultimate evil and to be avoided at all costs. In this model software development has been viewed as a solitary and focused effort requiring a private space to operate at peak efficiency. The agile community has challenged this notion with practices like pair programming, common ownership, and continuous integration. The agile premise is that if you can get a team into a flow state you can get a greater amount of productivity than if you got each individual into flow state.

Obviously to achieve this team flow state you need a team communication mechanism that supports good communication types and limits bad communication types. The physical configuration of the space can help or hinder both good and bad communication types. Our goal will be to create spaces that promote the flow state by enabling good communication types and hindering bad communication types. This of course is not the only aspect of achieving enhanced team productivity.

You might find interesting parallels in the alien dog packs in the 1991 Hugo award winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought) by Vernor Vinge. The aliens are not sentient as individuals but in small groups they can form a sentient intelligence. The trouble is they use sound waves to create the personal area network that enables the emergence of a sentient intelligence. This has certain proximity implications. For example, two packs can’t maintain their sentience if they are too close to each other. The interference from too many sounds removes the cohesion necessary to maintain sentience. When we try to co-locate two agile teams in the same space without sufficient sound considerations we can see both teams struggle to achieve flow state.

So stay tuned as we embark on this journey to create spaces that promote agile practices and prove that they improve our productivity.