Mary Panza, Parametric Portfolio Associate
Some Agile software teams struggle to colocate their members so the software developers and testers can be near each other at work. The Parametric development team members had the luxury of sitting together in the IT department from the beginning, but sought even greater flexibility and efficiencies. We took the bold step of colocating some development teams with the end-users of the software they write. We had lofty goals for the experiment and some specific expectations, but ended up with some unexpected results, as well.
This paper serves as a case study and a retrospective on our effort. It discusses our reasons for moving the teams, as well as the lessons we learned and the changes made to our process. The colocation experiment caused our development organization re-examine its best practices and processes. We would like to share our findings with other teams and organizations.
