Death of the Cubicle; the Open Office Experiment

Open office environments are critical to the success of agile projects, but transitioning an organization from traditional cubicles to an open office environment can be difficult and uncomfortable. Our company successfully accomplished this in a stepwise fashion that allowed us to gain acceptance from the developers and management; the end result was an office environment that allows our agile teams to excel. Part of this transition included an open office experiment where we moved 38 engineers into an open office environment and studied the impact and implications. This report describes our findings from the open office experiment.