I've been a bit slow to get this news out. Over the summer we reorganized the MSF team in to the Patterns and Practices team and moved our offices to building 5 on the Redmond campus. We now share the beautiful new collaboration space that the PnP created. The plans for this were laid when Ward Cunningham and Jim Newkirk were on the team.

Before I share some photos of the new space, I want to be clear that MSF is still part of Visual Studio Team System. What actually happened was PnP was merged in to the VSTS team. After that was completed it made natural sense to move MSF in to the PnP team. I joked that we were putting all the non-revenue generating things together in one bucket but actually what we did is put all the practices and guidance and methodology things together in one team in the one collaborative space.

As part of the reorganization, Steve Elston takes over as the Group Manager for MSF and Sanjeev Garg is our new Program Manager. There is a slightly modified role for Randy Miller who becomes the Product Planner for MSF. Meanwhile, my title was changed to Process Architect.

I'm also incredibly excited to announce that Alan Wills has joined the team as Software Architect. Alan has a strong background in methodology with his work on Catalysis with Desmond D'Sousa in the 1990's. Adding Alan adds some significant intellectual horsepower to our team.

Mean while we have collocated the team in one of the flexible collaboration work spaces in building 5. Finally, the MSF team gets to be agile. This will greatly enhance our productivity and quality and I'm very excited about our next release of MSF - which is being targeted to coincide with the launch of the Database Professional version of VSTS (sorry, I won't talk about dates ;-) ).

Here are a few pictures of the new flexible work space in building 5. It's a PnP experiment to show how Microsoft can build a work environment for agility and agile practices.

This is the entrance to the wing of building 5 where the new space has been built.

This open collaborative space is mostly reserved as "hot" or "jump" stations for contractors and visiting staff.

This is my new office. The offices are smaller than traditional Microsoft personal offices. However, they have sliding doors to save space. They also have glass walls and doors to let light through in to the central collaborative working spaces.

Notice in this second one, how the walls can move.

And here is one of those. The space can actually be configured in to different sized rooms. This is one of the larger ones.

And here is another one. Note the different layout in the room.

The tables are designed to take two flat panel monitors using these flexible brackets.

Many of the walls are glass to allow light to penetrate deep in to the building. Some of these are opaque and double as whiteboards.

There are also some small rooms for private meetings, conference calls and brainstorming sessions.

We also have a social area with a big screen - ideal for watching World Cup Soccer games.

The collaboration spaces have sliding glass doors again to save space and allow light in to the room. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSFT, Microsoft, Patterns+Practices, MSF