Found this article by William Pietri on showing their team room. They’ve set up their room based on the methodology of Extreme Programming, but I see they have couple of great setup for normal team as well:
- Nature light presents, but not directly shine behind the monitor
- Enough whiteboards to store information and brainstorm with ideas
- Enough rooms for two people to colloborate on the same computer
- Two monitors to increase viewable space for higher productivity
- Great chairs with good back support
What else do you see which are great setups?
An XP Team Room – [Scissor]
Typo in the link, Extreme.
Fixed. Thanks!
My favorite style of ‘war-rooms’ is a room with a big conference table in the middle, with everyone’s laptops around it. Easy to communicate, yell, talk, etc. Also, buy this whiteboard type material (from home depot) and cover every inch of all walls with it. Works really well for discussions and such. Printer/scanner/fax in one corner, and voila, you’re set to solve another crisis. Nothing fancy, just focus and get the job done.
Yeah right…. show me a manager in their right mind who would give up that much prime window real estate, the dual monitor and the comfy chairs so that two programmers can work on one program. What a joke.
Hi, Lawrence. Sorry for the slow reply, but I just noticed this.
It’s hard to tell from this photo, but there were two dual-monitor stations back to back, and another desk for the product manager just to the left of the frame. So it was a total of five people on one project, not two. If you click through to the article, you’ll see more detail.
The furniture was just what came with the office space; it would be a weird manager indeed who took away chairs because they looked too darned comfortable. Maybe our values get distorted in Silicon Valley, but the general feeling here is that if you’re going to pay that much for engineers, it’s good financial sense to pay a little more so they actually like where they work.