The Art of Agile Development....

Steve Bockman recommended the excellent book, "The Art of Agile Development" to me yesterday so I popped into my Amazon account and by 3pm today I had the book in my hands. It's a fantastic book.

The section on "Sit Together" discusses many of the issues I'm trying to address with the ATD (page 113). Of course sitting together is going to be the best solution, however it may not be an available solution. So, I read the section on sitting together looking for strategies where the ATD could assist communications. Some of the comments I found interesting were:

• As distance grows, communication decreases.
• The Teasley field study found sitting together double productivity.
• The Teasley field study found sitting together reduced time to market to one third.
• XP Teams spend a greater percentage of time coding.
• The cocktail party effect (osmotic communication) plays a big part in effectiveness.
• Much less "us vs them" attitude when sitting together.
• More tuned in because you can "overhear" what others are doing.
• One person interrupted will take 15 minutes to get back into flow (Demarco & Lister).
• A programming pair interrupted will resume flow quicker by keeping each other on track.

The ATD could probably help with a couple of these items. The cocktail party effect, where someone overhears something of interest to them, is a good example. Currently the feeds envisioned for the ATD include:

• Checkins to source control.
• Updates to the team board (scrumworks).
• Calendar items

Each of these is an opportunity for "overhearing" something of interest but it's not very interactive. Checkins, for example, happen after the work has been done. Updates to the team board happen half the time before the work and half the time after the work.

What I would like to know - at a glance - is what component is Jim working on? What is Don looking at? What test is Steve running?

With a very simple Visual Studio add-in I think this could be approximated. I'm envisioning an add-in which would publish the active lists of open files in visual studio to a rolling log filtered by person such that what you have open in VS could be tracked by other team members. With such a log you could even place "watches" or "alerts" for activity in certain files, so you would be "beeped" or "alerted" to activity in those files. This would emulate the cocktail party effect.

More later...