Team seating

Our team has a new office space and a new seating arrangement. As you can see from the image below we have two groups of tables to be used by our two project teams. There are four developers sitting closely together in both groups.

We had the opportunity to select new tables and we settled with simple rectangular shaped ones without any extra widgets. (Well there are those adjustable monitor stands in four tables, but otherwise these are as simple as they get.) The rectangular shape is good as we want to work in pairs from time to time. Pairing was impossible with our old tables shown here:

As you can see the one who is sitting in front of the keyboard is located in the corner of the table and his unfortunate pairing partner is forced to peeking around his shoulders if he wishes to see the monitor and even that way the monitor is too far for any practical work to happen. This kind of table is not really meant for software development.

Our new tables don't have any corners where one could hide. Additionally two developers are always sitting besides each other so that they can easily share information, ask questions, and do pair programming. We haven't settled into using pair programming seriously yet but the idea of sitting besides each other will probably have similar effects. Communication is the key here: The four guys sitting together should be in close communication with each other.

This side-by-side programming concept is described in Crystal Clear. The whole idea of having the teams sitting around a common table is from that book.

The only downside we have encountered with our new room is that it is noisy. The room does not have any soft materials that would eat out the sounds and therefore they keep echoing around. That could be fixed for example with a big soft sofa...

Comments

Hi. I have a question for you. What to do when working in this close space and trying to concentrate on some complex features, but, the engineers right beside me, starts to have a chat on some stuffs that happened yesterday or the problems that they are having to do their work?

[Anssi Piirainen]

Sometimes it is actually a bit difficult to find concentration time. But I still think that the benefits of collocation outweight the disadvantages. I have heard that some teams agree upon using headphones when they need to be left alone: if a person has his headphones on, it means that he would not like to be interrupted. Music might be on or off...

Thanks so much for replying. Now I am a bit sure that this is a real problem and if you could talk about this a little more please. One idea you have already said that headphones could be a sign to request quiet time. Have you seen anything more on this? I really feel that engineers have different ways to work and these varies depending on the level of complexities of the features. For example, when the feature is simple and I feel that I am in control of my schedule, I enjoy when others are discussing about games, problems in personal lives/working time, etc. and even try to join them. But when the features are complex and I seem to be missing the deadline, well, I am not that happy at that time.