For newcomers in Scrum and XP, its often difficult to appreciate a "War Room" or "Team Room" or often called as "Scrum Room". The conventional seating which depicted the hierarchies is slowly fading. Project's Team is recognizing the importance of the communication and how to make it effective by sitting together.
Why a War Room :
- Even when the team is at the same location, cubicles are barriers
- We want to move away from the irony of sending e-mails for each small detail and then waiting for the reply
- Its the easiest way to see EVERYONE related to project in one room
- Asking a question is as simple as waving at someone ...
- It promotes more of an open culture and free communication
- Everyone can see the Product back-log
- Product Owner or Product Manager is available when ever needed
- Everyone can see the Current Stories running and also see the Alert Cards
- And finally the Continuous Integration Server for everyone to access and showing the build statistics of all modules
War Room definitely has its positive aspects of team building. Along with promoting the open communication it also narrows the bureaucracy.
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What about sustained concentration?
Barriers are not completely pointless. It's not always "ironic" to send small emails with questions, then wait for the reply. It's also not always good to be able to ask a question simply by waving.
Some programming problems require sustained concentration to solve. Some developers are more able than others to deal with frequent interruptions... but many just cannot do without some extended periods of uninterrupted focus.
Sometimes it's worth it to sacrifice that; I actually do feel that the war room style environment is incredibly useful, and I can work perfectly well that way as long as I can put aside "the hard stuff" for later. But if there is no "later" when I can shut down the IMs & emails & conversations and achieve some real focus, that's a serious problem.
What about sustained concentration?
A very valid point on the Sustained Concentration. Teams normally allocate time during the Standup meetings to discuss any issues. I normally observe that teams do have atleast 4-5 hours of un-interrupted work schedule. Its very normal that during the initial stage of project there are more discussions and as the project continues, discussions take a down slope in terms of frequency and length.
Why not some other name instead of "WAR ROOM"
I tried to bring the concept of WAR room in my project ( I am a just a team member in an Agile project) but it was greeted with a lot of "No No"
probably the name had something too much of violence or the people including the Project manager did not have anything in mind other than the daily tasks sent from onsite(i.e. nobody had any interest in building up a process)
I thought ...
instead of "War Room" ..."Agile Hour" would be better
alternative for War Rooms
Is there any alternative solutions for the WAR ROOM and stand-up meetings ....possibly any web 2.0 alternative ???
Scrum teams in my department
Scrum teams in my department prefer calling it a "scrum room". Exactly because "war room" sounds a bit too extreme :)
As for the electronic alternative for the war room, I don't think electonic replacement can do it. If you don't have any other choice, naturally you can try "gathering" on a wiki+teleconference, or on some SecondLife island. However, in general I don't think the electronic communication can be close to the effectiveness of just live and ad-hoc meetings in the common room with a lot of whiteboards and project charts.
War Room Applicability
In the current project I am on, we havea WAR room where all participants of the project sit in, even the architects and managers, along with all the developers. The requirements engineers are also available in the war room. There is a total of about 10 people in the room at any time. A couple of rules that make the use of a war room beneficial:
* any one has the right to say hold on when asked a question
* questions are mostly prefixed with "if you have a second, can I please ask a little of your time"
* any managerial meetings that may disrupt "sustained concentration" are done outside the war room
* many small requests between developers are done by IM to minimize noise.
* screen sharing is used when necessary
With these implicit rules, the benefits of a War Room are being achieved.
I thought ...
"Agile Hour" seems to be an hour meeting againt the ideal 10-15 minute scrum daily meetings. These 1 hour meetings seem to die sooner.
You are right ...Actually
You are right ...Actually ours is a very big team of 50 people. nearly 30 people working on the legacy modules and 20 on the New Modules.
That is the reason the meeting drags on to 1 hour ..sometimes even 1 and half hours .
Devide and Rule
I wonder why such a big team does not split itself into several smaller teams at least informally. could it be that the root of the problem is in that the team is not really allowed to self-organize?
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