Best Seating Arrangement For a Team of Developers?

TekNullOG writes "I was given the job to prepare the logistics involved with moving our office. At the same time my bosses asked me to look into buying new desks for a small team of four developers and to consider if it could benefit the team to sit at a round table. In many offices and departments it increases productivity and makes collaboration easy. However, I am concerned that putting developers around a table could potentially be distracting consequently diminishing productivity by increasing coding errors. What are your thoughts?"

Comments

Scientific Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

There are scientific studies that show significantly increased productivity by giving each developer their own office with a door they can close. Interruptions and distractions can torpedo productivity. These are mentioned, for example, in Steve McConnell's book, Rapid Development.

The agile crowd claims that having all the developers together increases productivity because you might overhear a conversation and be able to contribute something of use. In support of this they cite only personal impressions and anecdotal evidence. I know of not a single scientific study that supports their claim.

Re:Why not

[eonlabs]

I don't know, it may not be something they're immediately aware of.
A seating arrangement I've found works well is on the inside of a ring.
Have the desks setup with dividers so if someone needs to buckle down
and focus, they can, but if they need to confer, they can turn around.

I've tried cubes, offices, labs, and that setup, and I'd have to say,
for small groups, it seems to work out the nicest.

Re:Good plan

[nschubach]

The current situation I'm in: (Yes, it's a rant...)

I sit in a half cubicle (where the wall only wraps the desk and no more and it's short enough to peek over without standing) and right next to me is my boss. Everyone else on our team is in different states. My desk also happens to be right next to the break room where people religiously burn popcorn, microwave fish, and speak to each other as if they are in a stadium because the television is turned up loud enough to drown out said people. There is someone about 12 feet behind me in a similar such cube whom I constantly hear sucking on one of those water bottles and randomly taking a bite out of an apple or other similar food product. I get a whole 5 minutes a day to do something that's not "work related" because someone thought it would be a great idea to take our Scrum process and turn it into a timesheet detailing what we did the previous day and if we don't account for at least 6 hours of work, who knows what will happen. But we are asked on our Scrum meetings to justify at least 6 hours of work.

My only solitude is late at night when most of the people have gone home, and that's when I get the most work done.

We used to be able to work from home, but some idiot decided it would be best to move to a VPN system that requires system validation to determine if you are on a work Laptop before granting you access to RDP to your own PC and I am not in a line of work that "requires a laptop." Said VPN system limits me to only browsing web pages. Big waste of time and resources since they are paying for my RSA token and account access that I can no longer use.

My suggestion for the OP... ask your developers. If you have the chance to give your developers a choice, DO IT! Then ask them again in 6 months to see if the situation is working. Above all, give them a chance to find a quiet place and don't force them into an open arena where people are constantly looking over their shoulder.

Re:can we tag the article flamebait ?

[JWSmythe]

    The last gig I did, I sat opposite the other developer who I needed frequent contact with. Everyone else got me by email, and I would initiate return phone calls. This avoided unnecessary interruptions in my workflow, and I could queue their requests to allow me to optimize my time.

    In the past I've used similar setups. Do all the developers need almost constant face time with each other? Probably not. Then why stuff them in the same room?

    At one company, everyone in the same office suite had their own office. That was maybe 1/3 of the development and systems staff. The rest were around the world. Communications were generally by email, except when live interaction was required. This kind of setup worked very well for me, so I could be at home, the office, or the datacenter, and there was no interruption to my workflow, except when I was traveling. It all worked out very well. It didn't matter what timezone someone was sitting in, the communications flow worked fluidly. That was a situation where all of the members of the crew were very good at their tasks, and didn't have to ask for help for stuff very much. Communications were limited to status updates and functionality interaction statements. Well, we'd BS sometimes, which was good for morale and to get to know each other better. I worked with a developer in Russia for probably two years before I ever heard his voice, and never did see him in person. I did know his work was accomplished properly, and his requests to me were usually "I need this functionality on these servers." I may ask for clarification, but since he knew what he was talking about his request were usually very clear.

    I guess if you have a team who are going to have lots of questions because they aren't totally clear on what they're doing, stuffing them all in a room is a good idea. A well thought out and documented project plan would alleviate a lot of those problems though. I can imagine a room with 10 developers who can shout questions to each other would create an amazingly high amount of unwanted distractions. Verbal communications also reduce the paper trail. If everything is done via email, no one can say "I asked you for ..." and it wasn't done because it hadn't actually been asked for. The simple "You requested X at 3:30 and I responded it was completed at 5:00" is amazingly useful down the line. It completely eliminates mistakes in memory where we thought something was asked.

    I've annoyed a few people before where I've told them to always email the requests to me. When they've failed to do so, but insist that they did ask for it, I can usually recite the conversation verbatim, and then they'll remember that they had only intended to ask for it, and never actually said to do it. That's usually enough to initiate the email papertrail so the same mistake doesn't happen again.