O livro Peopleware tem vários capítulos que abordam o assunto. Você pode ler um resumo decente aqui .
Estudos liderados por Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister mostrou resultados estatisticamente significativos sobre a correlação entre ruído e defeitos.
Aqui está uma parte interessante do resumo:
Workplace Quality and Product Quality - Companies that provide small and noisy workplaces explain away complaints as workers campaigning for the added status of bigger, more private space. To determine whether noise level had any correlation to work, we divided our sample into those who found the workplace acceptably quiet and those who didn't. Then, looking at workers within each group who completed the entire exercise without a single defect:
> Workers who reported that their workplace was acceptably quiet before
the exercise were 1/3 more likely to deliver zero-defect work.
As the noise level gets worse, this trend gets stronger:
- Zero-defect workers: => 66% reported noise level OK
- 1-or-more-defect workers: => 8% reported noise level OK
A Discovery of Nobel Prize Significance - On February 3, 1984, in a study of 32,346 companies worldwide, the authors confirmed a virtually perfect inverse relationship between people density and dedicated floor space per person. If you're having trouble seeing why this matters, you're not thinking about noise. Noise is directly proportional to density, so halving the allotment of space per person can be expected to double the noise. Even if you managed to prove conclusively that a programmer could work in 30 sq. ft. without being hopelessly space-bound, you still wouldn't be able to conclude that 30 sq. ft. is adequate space. The noise in a 30 sq. ft matrix is more than triple the noise in a 100 sq. ft. matrix, which could make the difference between a plague of product defects and none at all.
Verifique o resumo, realmente, ruído é um dos assuntos recorrentes no Peopleware.