As I was browsing through my daily feed as usual, this blog stood out. It explained the importance of Osmotic Communication In Agile Context. If you have time to read that blog, please go through; it’s pretty interesting. For me, two points stood out.
The importance of communications in the Agile setup can never be over-stated. The write-up covered the “Caves and Commons” setup, which is suitable for an Agile environment. The work environments that I had been were all rectangular cubicle boxes which were uncomfortably smaller and closer to each other, and individual productivity was affected because of another team member speaking loudly over their phone, or hollering out to another team member. Probably a hub and spoke kind of setup would be a great setup for Agile – where the end of the spoke will be the individual team member’s work space, and the hub centre would be the place where team discussions can take place.
The next thing was the stressing on the physical proximity of the team members. Interestingly, just a couple of days back, I wrote about the importance of documentation in Software Development. Many argue that documentation is not important, and team sync. through conversations is important. That argument has been sufficiently addressed in Simon Brown’s post referred in that blog about Software Architecture. You cannot expect physical proximity and learning through hearing alone to update your knowledge on a software, because today’s software is quite complex and has several dependencies. It is not possible to keep up with a mental construct of the Software architecture just by mind, and that too for every team member including Software Testing professionals. So, documentation is unavoidable, irrespective of whether the team members are working remotely or they are in physical proximity to each other.
Osmotic Communication In Agile Context is important, but we got to be practical about our work environments too.
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