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Radical Colocation is a Good Thing
processes & methodologies, software development
November 15, 2003, 03:32 PM
Joel has an article up on the subject of adopting methodologies for software development. He makes a lot of good points about the state of the practice, but when discussing the subject of whether software development should occur in private offices or public collaboration spaces, he makes the following claim:
But we don't have the data. We don't have any data. You can give us anecdotes left and right about how methodology X worked or didn't work, but you can't prove that when it worked it wasn't just because of one really, really good programmer on the team, and you can't prove that when it failed is wasn't just because the company was in the process of going bankrupt and everybody was too demoralized to do anything at all, Aeron chairs notwithstanding.
This isn't quite true. Earlier this year I came across an article that came from Judy Olson's research group on this subject called "How does radical collocation help a team succeed?". It's an amazing piece of empirical software engineering research that gives some hard data to back up the claim that putting everyone in the same room together increases productivity in software teams. Due to copyright concerns I can't repost it here, but you can find it in the ACM digital library if you're a member. Here's the abstract:
Companies are experimenting with putting teams into warrooms, hoping for some productivity enhancement. We conducted a field study of six such teams, tracking their activity, attitudes, use of technology and productivity. Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity. Why? Among other things, teams had easy access to each other for both coordination of their work and for learning, and the work artifacts they posted on the walls remained visible to all. These results imply that if we are to truly support remote teams, we should provide constant awareness and easy transitions in and out of spontaneous meetings.
In short, the article found that, in the situation under study (small teams, fixed time frame), radical collocation drastically increased the productivity of the software teams, as measured by a function point count that they compared to the count for the company's standard cubicle setting as well as to a whole industry baseline. They also found that although many of the participants were reluctant to work in the collocated environment at first, they came around by the end of the study. Not surprisingly, they did find that certain tasks with high cognitive demands were hard to perform in the collocated environment due to constant distractions, so they recommend including private "hoteling" areas for such tasks as well as for placing personal phone calls and the like.
The actual article is worth a read if you can get to it, especially since they conclude with recommendations for developing effective collocated and remote work environments based on their findings. And if you're a researcher, the study is a great model of the direction the field of empirical software engineering should go in if they wish to provide the kind of hard data that Joel correctly points out is sadly lacking in the current state of the science.
Posted by Rob on November 19, 2003 at 02:17 PM
A quick correction: the final version of these research was published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 28, No. 7, July 2002, under the title "Rapid Software Development through Team Collocation". This version contains more detail on the findings as well as more discussion on the conclusions than the article I initially mentioned.