Dylan Salisbury’s weblog

Software engineering guru Alistair Cockburn found that one property of most successful small co-located development teams is osmotic communication.

Here are two photos of work spaces that allow for osmotic communication:

1. Tellme, a Microsoft Subsidiary (where I work) – See http://www.tellme.com/about/careers and click on the second photo.

2. Noop.nl, home of prolific software management blogger Jurgen Appelo – See http://www.noop.nl/2008/10/how-to-do-many-projects-with-few-people.html

Which development teams achieve osmotic communication on their projects? Fortunately, Jurgen explains how they run their projects — trying to keep everyone working on one project at a time, seating the project team together, and having a project manager help keep distractions away from the team (although I bet the seating arrangement accomplishes 80% of that job).

You can’t see it from the photo, but at Tellme, we have longer projects that require deep involvement of more people, and for a number of reasons many engineers spend time on two or more projects each week. We also have an remote work culture that accommodates certain key engineers who work from home in remote locations, and some other engineers who work from home a portion of each week. So the flow of information is probably a lot different than the Noop.pl office even though we reap many benefits from the open seating arrangement.