No I am not off my rocker or renouncing my beliefs and experiences with agile practices. I am a fan of precision. I like well engineered gadgets, cars, motorcycles, and systems. I prefer that our use of language is chosen with care to convey precise meanings. The term “War Room” is commonly used to describe a team collaboration space. Unfortunately teams generally go to a “War Room” during unusual activities – a bug bash, a production problem, a security breach. All of these are a crisis event. This is the root of why I don’t like the term “War Room.” For movie fans the quote from Dr. Strangelove is very apropos:  

“Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the War Room!”

I believe the default state of a development team should not be in crisis. The natural state of a productive development team is in collaboration. This is accomplished by having the team do the majority of its work together. One of the most effective ways to facilitate this is by putting the team in a common shared space. Calling this space a “War Room” commutates the team is in crisis when it isn’t, or shouldn’t be.

So what should this space be called? One of the neat things about language is that sometimes precision is emergent – it takes time and use of imprecise terms to get the collective social consciousness to reach agreement. I have seen these spaces called “Team Room”(bland), “Collaboration Space” (unwieldy), Pit (short but certainly not sweet); the truth is that the term “War Room” has what an oenophile would call good mouth feel. I am hoping that a good collective term becomes emergent soon.

If you have a better term please drop me a line. I would love to hear it.  

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