I'm in two minds about this kind of thing. On the upside, some of these ideas really do seem like they could help programmers to do things quickly and with fewer bugs. On the downside, the combination of bright colours, constant supervision, hand-holding, over-planning and idiot-proofing would make me feel like some kind of cross between a kindergartener and a galley slave.
"We also followed the XP practice of pair programming, which is why you'll see only two desks for the four programmers."<p>Pair programming is stupid. It is ok in only two situations:<p>A senior engineer is teaching around a more junior engineer (or somebody that just started).<p>There is a modification/urgent patch going on, that is touching very critical point of the application, or that is being done right before the product is shipping.<p>I just can't imagine good developers like pair programing. It is such a waste of resources.
Any system that depends on whiteboards and cards (like XP and Agile seem to be obsessed with) is going to fail miserably when you have a development team / company spread across offices on different continents (hell, probably even different cities). I figure you could get by with using an equivalent webapp or some other application, though.<p>Please enlighten me if I'm wrong.
Isn't this anti-37 signals?<p>Ok ok , before the downmods come, I'm just saying!!!
This seems to be everything that 37 signals DOES NOT stand for, so the point is ...to each his own!
A guy I used to work with found that his code was much better when he explained it to me as he was writing it. [Note: this seemed to work whether I was there or not.]
1 computer and 2 guys? Their budget must be horrible, poor people can't even afford a second pair of keyboard and a mouse so they can at least use the same machine at he same time :D