There isn't a simple dichotomy of remote versus co-located work, instead there are several patterns of distribution for teams each of which has different trade-offs and effective techniques suitable for them. While it's impossible to determine conclusive evidence, my sense is that most groups are more productive working in a co-located manner. But you can build a more productive team by using a distributed working model, because it gives you access to a wider talent pool.

How do you improve the productivity of software developers?

With the growing interest in data analytics and visualizations, we're seeing more effort put into interesting visualizations that allow people to draw insight from data floating around in an organization. Most of these dashboards are aimed at individual usage, but there is a growing tendency to use them for a more communal purpose.

A common thing you find in agile projects is that the development team sits in a single open team room. It was advocated early on in Extreme Programming and called out as one of primary practices in the second edition. Agilists favor a open team room as it promotes lots of informal and deep communication between people on the team.

The default layout of workstations in a TeamRoom is a central desk, with everyone sitting around it. However a number of my colleagues now prefer a u-pod, with developers in the middle of a U shape of tables.