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.

digg has been growing like crazy, creating space problems for our development department, resulting not only in excessive density, but in our team being spread across several floors. these space issues have caused significant challenges for our emerging agile development environment, stifling informal communication and making it difficult to organize teams into cohesive groups.

i'm currently working on re-engineering many of the development processes at digg. we're adopting a number of practices from the agile world that complement the type of development that we do. these practices include: build automation, automated deployment, daily scrums, short releasable time-boxed iterations, simple design, refactoring, and just-in-time specification.

we've decided to be agile about our adoption of our new agile processes, introducing them incrementally, measuring the results along the way and iterating as necessary.

as we worked through the cascading dependencies of our adoption path, it quickly became clear that automated testing had to be a cornerstone practice if we were going to make a success of the others.