Hi,

Does anyone have any links to studies that show developers require silence / quiet time to be productive?

Does anyone here believe more quiet time = greater productivity? Or the contrary?  If so, whats your reasons?

Our company is considering moving to an "open plan" office scenario, where the developers will be in the same room as everyone else - noise, telephone calls etc (Right now we have our own quiet room).

Any info much appreicated!

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=362626&isnumber=8308

But thats just the abstract...

 Not scientific but we used to all be in one office and I would hear everything going on.

It was a lot harder to concentrate.

Now I am in an office with one other person and it works a lot better.

Can't help with any case studies.

But I used to be in a smaller office (of 4 developers), then moved to a general IT open plan office.  It definately affects your concentration.  I took the MP3 player & headphones approach....  It shuts out the noise, but try not to pick music with too many lyrics, else you'll end up concentrating on the lyrics (and god forbid, start singing! ;)  hehe).