A Gallery of Team Rooms and Charts

This is a gallery of team rooms, and the Big Visible Charts/Information Radiators they use. Please send email to William.Wake@acm.org and have yours included!

Jump to the oldest photos at the bottom of the page.

18. Team room picture, from Ilja Preuß (Posted Feb. ’09, pictures from April ’08)

“Our team (see 11. at http://xp123.com/articles/a-gallery-of-team-rooms-and-charts/) moved into new rooms some time ago, and I finally got around shooting photos. Attached is a panorama photomontage of the room. Feel free to publish it on your website.

There are eight developers working in the room – a ninth will join us in a few weeks. Many of the workstations are equipped with a second mouse and keyboard for pair programming. Two even can switch their input devices and monitors to be connected to the same PC, being able to pair program without even leaving their table.

On the very left you can see a monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers being connected to a server in a different room, running some custom made monitoring and “telemetrics” software. In the corner, you see the traffic light showing the state of the continuous build.

Behind the walls on the right is a smaller room having a flip chart, white board, single work station and sofa. It is used both as a meeting room, for discussions with customers over telephone, and for power napping.

The blue, lengthy bag on the right contains a foldable hammock – our emergency fallback when the sofa isn’t available… ;)”
(Click to see full-sized picture)

17. Team room pictures, “Oxygen” (Posted Feb. ’09, pictures from Nov. ’07)

Originals at http://judykat.com/ken/2007/11/24/our-team-room/ (with some descriptive text).

I love the Space Invaders paint job.

(Click to see full-sized picture)

16. Team room pictures, courtesy of Bryan Nehl (Oct., 2006)

“At the end of the open space we had a large whiteboard, bulletin board and team calendar.

The whiteboard was used to sketch out ideas and arrange user stories/tasks that were initially created by brainstorming with sticky pads.

The bulletin board had the teams 6 month goals, weekly goals, sample story card and cards in progress or future cards. Also, you’ll see some process diagrams, the “XP movers” cartoon, a list of overall project priorities, and a list of releases to production.

The Calendar was used for planning and coordinating time off.

We also had a meeting table in the middle of the open space where we could all come together for team meeting and collaborating.”

(Click to see full-sized picture)

“At the station pictured you’ll see the dual monitor, dual mouse/keyboard set up. The laptop off to the side was for email and other production account use. Development machines were on a separate domain.”
(Click to see full-sized picture)

“We also had a user testing station in our area.

After having switched the team from a cubicle farm with silo’ed developers to XP with an open workspace all of the developers have said they would never want to do it any other way again.”

(Click to see full-sized picture)

15. Ternary Software (Oct., 2006)

(Obsolete link: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011073507/http://ternarysoftware.com/)

A status board showing who plans to do what today, and where people expect to be.
(Click to see full-sized picture)

A different team room.
(Click to see full-sized picture)

A progress chart. The part in the middle is from an old project (and is just “background” at this time). The orange sticky notes show progress (moving left as stories are done). The dots in the corners of the story cards represent priority.
(Click to see full-sized picture)

A task board for the system administrator, showing stories and priorities. The sticky notes on the cards show who will do the work and how long they expect it to take.
(Click to see full-sized picture)

“Permission for use and re-use for non-commercial purposes granted by Ternary Software, Inc.”

14. Iteration progress chart.

Courtesy of Geoffrey Slinker, who says, “Items progress in the bottom boxes from right to left, then up into ‘this iteration,’ then progress across the top, then land in the finished box. I use sticky notes, and I stack them and keep them so that when performance review time comes along I can refresh my mind on everything I have accomplished.” (May, 2006)

(Click to see full-sized picture)

13. Build toy at THI Insurance.
Jeff Morgan writes:

An XP team at THI Insurance has converted a trailer hitch into a build failure notification. When the build breaks, the deer flaps its front legs.

See a video (2M, AVI).

(Click to see full-sized picture)

12. Build light at http://www.touchclarity.com
Courtesy of Chris Smith, who writes:

“This is a real, four foot high British traffic light, which is hooked up to our build machine. It was a scoop at only £40 from ebay, but I didn’t envy my colleague who had to bring it into work on a crowded London train.

The build machine also plays sounds when the build status changes:
Red: compilation failure; plays a submarine style siren sound
Amber: test failure; plays a ‘wrong answer’ sound from a game show
Green: build success; plays a ‘Hallelujah!’ sound

We also have a secret Friday night mode that plays disco music and alternates combinations of lights to the beat, but we haven’t shown that to the Customer yet 🙂

So, do we have the coolest build status lights?”

Chris adds, “you and others are free to use the photo wherever you like.”

11. Cadenza team from disy Informationssysteme GmbH (www.disy.net). January, 2006.

Pictures provided by Ilja Preuß. There are more on their egroup, at http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-ka/ (German).

10. More pictures from William Pietri (Sept., 2005)

This is a small selection from his wonderful page at http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/ (Used with permission)

The full story planning board.

The current stories.

9. Mountain Goat Software (2005)

Here’s Mike Cohn’s generic taskboard, then a couple “live” ones. These pictures are from http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/taskboard.php; used with permission.

Mike tracks by story. The other cards represent tasks, and show what state they’re in.

8. Emergys
(March, 2004)
“What we do trying to expend less money as possible, we set a wireless access point in the room and we can move furniture all around whatever we like.” –Marco Marquez

7. Software team doing a fixed-price conversion project
(December, 2003)

The two columns show status for each test both pre-conversion and post-conversion.

Green squares show tests that pass.
Red squares show tests that failed.
Blue squares show tests that failed for reasons outside the teams’ control.
X’s show tests not yet run.

Numbers in the squares correspond to those issue list at the lower left.

The graph in the lower right shows tests over time, and should move to “all green.”

6. www.binaryessentials.com – An XP Workshop
An Indian organization for XP coaching and consulting. More photos from this workshop are available.

5. Key Technology, Medford, OR

“Normally we pair at separate computers (side by side) using a shared VNC session. It takes a bit of getting used to since everyone has a keyboard and mouse. It’s easy to click or type and mess up someone else. On the plus side, it takes even less time to switch roles.

The monitor you can see in the back corner does double duty for our build server and our Windows box.”

(Picture is damaged.)

4. An XP team coached by William. Pietri
Build state shown by an Ambient Orb (TM): “In the photo, the build is broken.”

Story cards: “Each row is a week of effort. Cards with a big checkmark are done; blue post-its contain customer-written outlines of tests cases; yellow stickies contain unresolved questions for the customer. The cards are held to the glass with little stick-on hooks. Down at the bottom right is a little pouch with blank cards and a pencil.”