Same exact story here - worked in an open office that was awful that we slowly transformed into one that functioned extremely well. Where I've always thought o

Same exact story here - worked in an open office that was awful that we slowly transformed into one that functioned extremely well. Where I've always thought open offices break down is when you have the space filled with people who wouldn't normally talk to each other if they were in their own offices. Organizations that have roughly the same number of projects as they have developers. Where it started to work extremely well, is when the only people within a 10 foot radius of me exclusively worked on the same project, codebase and backlog as me. If you're building a component for a developer that's sitting to the right of you, tested by a QA sitting to the left of you with business rules written by the BA sitting behind you it's incredible how fast you can move.