Cram the team into a small space or let them think
Have a look at the these two pictures of a team room. They appear on Ken H. Judy's blog in a post called Our Team Room:
Do you think you could work in such a small and crowded place? I'm sure I would not be able to concentrate. I know this is what XP is meant to look like, but I seriously doubt that this setting will create better quality software than a quite work environment where people can focus. To me this is more a room for training sessions than the place where you work for months on a product.
Instead I prefer and recommend private offices - with a door you can close - for each developer or a larger room for a small group of people who go well together and don't distract themselves by talking to much. After all software development requires that you process a lot of complex information in your head and the last thing you are looking for is distraction.
Savila's issue list allows the team to focus on the current sprint's stories:
And if you happen to use Eclipse, you can use Mylyn to even focus more on just the classes that are related to the task you are working on:
On the other hand such a "war room", as some call it, might be well suited, if the task for a team is to fix a problem, some kind of an emergency. Then such a setting makes a lot of sense. Is software development about fixing something or is it about creating something? What's the difference between the development of a product and integrating something into an existing system? I believe that when you create a new product, you should take your time and not do it in a hurry. New product development is more an exploration of a certain space, a journey and you don't know where you will end up or you might even realize after some time that you better cancel the project, because you learned something about another solution on the way. That's way different from integrating two systems or adding some smaller additional functionality to an existing system..
So I think that when we talk about work environment, Agile, Scrum and XP, we should as well define clearly what kind of work we are talking about and where we want to apply certain methodologies and techniques.
Re: Cram the team into a small space or let them think
Have you ever worked in a room like this? Are you genuinely interested in how effective an XP environment like this is, or are you mainly looking for excuses to segue into discussions about the product you're selling to agilists?
Cheers from NYC,
Luke
Re: Cram the team into a small space or let them think
How many people worked there usually? Based on the pictures I assume you have about 12 chairs. The difficulty I see with such a setting is that you need to focus on the conversation with your pairing partner and the problem you are trying to solve without being distracted by other conversation right next to you. Please share some details about your personal experience.
The other thing I'm interested in is: how did you distribute stories over the team? I assume you worked on several stories/features in parallel and not overbody on the same part of the product under development.
And to respond to your question. Savila is not yet on sale. Instead we are sharing it with other agilists to create a better product by learning from them.
Re: Cram the team into a small space or let them think
I'd encourage you to visit a war room like this and talk to people who work in this type of environment. My experience has been that the team is very focused and productive.  In my opinion, the gains in knowledge sharing and camaraderie amongst a group of talented individuals far outweighs what you lose by giving up that quiet office.