Experimental study of influence of group familiarity and information sharing on design review effectiveness

Research into group decision-making suggests that, dependent on the information distributed prior to a group discussion, the decision and discussion content can be predicted. While the impact to group decision-making has been studied, its impact on collaborative activities such as design review has not been well investigated. An experiment is conducted to investigate the effect of (1) group familiarity and (2) information held in common among group members on design review effectiveness. The results suggest that information held in common among group members affects the group's ability to identify design problems during a design review. Group familiarity was not found to have a significant effect on most of the results of the design review activity.