Last year I was in Stavanger speaking for NNUG. After the meeting some of the guys went out to have a beer and invited me with them. While we were sitting there and talking about stuff we’re only aloud to in circumstances like these, joined by fellow .Net mates (as appose to when we’re out with <normal/> people), we came across the subject of Scrum. I mentioned we were going to adopt Scrum, and in next sentence started talking about how we had grouped our office landscape. Not using cubicles but having all tables in the centre of the room, all looking in. One of the guys interrupted me and said: “You’re not suggesting that Scrum has anything to do with how you organize your landscape do you?” I responded; “Of course not!” and continued.

In this room we are 12 developers sitting around this “table”. We love it! (Thanks Torbjørn for the picture)

Scrum is all about Team communication. Letting a team being a team, performing as a team, talking as a team, making decisions as a team and so on. Very often Scrum starts out as a desperate solution for a team that keeps failing. They adopt Scrum and the team starts having success again, together, as a team. Why is that? I think it’s mainly because scrum (if properly adopted) focus on team communication. How do you communicate best with your team mate? If you turn your head and talk to him or if you have to climb over a wall (or maybe two, three…) to make contact?

I think this has a lot to do with who you are as a person, if you’re working on the same functionality (same problem domain) or actually in which country you live. Some people communicate well, others don’t. Some like talking, some don’t. If you’re working on the same problem as the guy next to you I think that could be really beneficial. If you live in Norway (like I do) we usually don’t sit in cubicles. We usually sit in an open landscape communicating freely. It might be a European thing, I don’t know…