Digg

André Maurois (1885-1967) wrote that "The effectiveness of work increases according to geometric progression if there are no interruptions." At Digg we struggle between the clear benefits of uninterrupted work and the need to be agile in our communication.

We've been gulping down the agile kool-aid at Digg for a while. We try to be agile in most of our development practices, especially around communication. We believe Alastiar Cockburn's assertion that face-to-face communication at a whiteboard is one of the most effective modes of conversation.

We do what we can to foster face-to-face communication:

• Sprint teams are structured as small, autonomous cross-functional groups that operate across all the phases of software development. Team members sit together.
• We discourage remote working and encourage temporal proximity i.e. a big overlap in working hours.
• Written documentation is kept to a minimum, and executable documentation (e.g. unit tests) is strongly encouraged.

Communication Vs Interruption

Some of our communication works effortlessly. Some of it, not so much. We do well with formal communication. We keep it lightweight. We struggle to keep meetings to a minimum but derive a lot of value from our daily sprint team standups, a weekly department-level demo friday and a monthly all hands.

Informal communication is more problematic at Digg. Developers often complain of being repeatedly distracted. Our open workspace design and physical collocation encourage the frequent "hey, do you have a second to look at my problem" type of interruption.

We're not alone with this problem. Paul Graham has a great discussion highlighting the difference between the maker's and a manager's schedule. He stresses the impact of interruption: "A meeting commonly blows at least half a day." Similarly Jason Fried writes on the difficulty of working at work and stresses that modern workplace is badly structured and is optimized for interruptions. He says "interruptions are the enemy of work, productivity and creativity." He makes a compelling case.

Striking a Balance

We struggle to find the right balance at Digg. We've seen huge productivity gains by encouraging face-to-face communication. And we're working to alleviate the associated problems. We've had luck with:

• Enforcing a strict "no meeting zone" from 1-5pm every day, where developers cannot be scheduled for meetings and are guaranteed a solid block of working time. This has been extremely popular with developers. Maintaining this has required constant vigilance since natural forces in the workplace constantly conspire to erode this time.
• Allowing teams to define "do not disturb" time blocks, where they refuse drive-by questions. This is counter balanced by "open hours", where any question can be asked.
• Adopting a "Caves and Commons" workspace plan. We have an open work area (the commons) that is designed to encourage osmotic communication. We also reserve a part of the room for private phone calls, meetings and isolated thinking. (We're in the process of redesigning our cave area).

Getting Better All The Time

Perfecting our development communication style is definitely a work in progress at Digg. It's not perfect, but, in the words of Paul McCartney, it's getting better all the time.

If you're interested in joining a world-class agile development team, check out jobs.digg.com

Take it easy,
John Quinn. VP Engineering. (Digg: doofdoofsf, Twitter: doofdoofsf)