If you believe the whole introvert/extrovert Jungian/Myers-Briggs thing I classify as an introvert and I love agile. So do lots of other folk I know - including

If you believe the whole introvert/extrovert Jungian/Myers-Briggs thing I classify as an introvert and I love agile. So do lots of other folk I know - including some of the people who actually started the whole agile thing (there was a long and tedious thread on the XP list on the topic if anybody cares to read up - see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/msearch?query=+Introverts%2C+Agile+and+Creativity http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/msearc...) As others have pointed out, no agile process that I am aware of recommends open plan offices. Open plan offices suck. What many in the agile community do recommend is having team rooms - where everybody working on a particular sits together. In fact the only agile process I'm aware of that makes any explicit statement on working environment is XP - which has having per-project team rooms as one of it's practices (the primary practice of "Sit together" In XP2E) And there's a lot of actual evidence that the team-room way of working is very, very effective. See this quora answer of mine for some references http://www.quora.com/Is-having-all-the-startup-engineers-work-at-the-same-room-a-good-thing-or-not/answer/Adrian-Howard http://www.quora.com/Is-having-all-the-startup-engineers-wor..., and the agile alliance guide has some references too http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/teamroom.html http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/teamroom.html. Especially the "Offices That Work" paper that has some nice info on the relative trade-offs. I find it curious that so many folk focus on individual performance - when most development is a team sport. I don't care if I'm a little less productive as an individual by a few project-related interruptions if the overall productivity of the team I'm working on improves.