Working Together in a Team Room is Best

GroupThink is bad, teamwork is good.  You must balance the two.

I'm a fan of team rooms for getting a sprint started, and for finishing a sprint, but in the middle I think they can be devastating.  At some point coders need to hunker down and write some code.

When Larry Maccherone measured team effectiveness he was surprised to learn that while team rooms did okay, teams that were distributed within the same timezone did best.  This disagrees with Agile lore.