The Impact of Collocation on the Effectiveness of Agile IS Development Teams

Mike Eccles, Joanne Smith, Maureen Tanner, Jean-Paul Van Belle and Stephan van der Watt

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Copyright © 2010 Mike Eccles, Joanne Smith, Maureen Tanner, Jean-Paul Van Belle and Stephan van der Watt. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License unported 3.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This article looks at the impact of collocation on the effectiveness of information system development teams. The research objective was to investigate which features of the collocation environment have the greatest influence on team effectiveness and how these can assist in a better design for a collocation working environment. The empirical foundation for this research was a number of agile software development teams. The two key factors which were found to impact team effectiveness were the impact of noise and interruptions, the use of war room layouts and the need for break-away areas.

Keywords: Collocation, War Rooms, Team Effectiveness, System Development, Agile Software Development.
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