Using a Large Whiteboard Wall to Support Software Development Teams

This paper reports on some salient characteristics of how a large (21-foot wide) whiteboard wall mediates and facilitates the work of a software development team. While most research on whiteboards report on their use in design conversations, our data show this large whiteboard wall fulfilling 59 different uses over a 17 month period. This paper describes this whiteboard wall, categorizes the uses, and illustrates a few ways in which it is intimately involved in how this software development team works. We conjecture that three aspects of this whiteboard wall make it into a particularly useful tool for self-organizing teams: its size, its surface material, and its location near the nexus of work.