Group support for technical review teams: an exploratory investigation

Group technical reviews play an important role in the software development process and may potentially benefit from group support systems. An experimental study was performed to learn more about the group review task and the productivity of review teams so that the opportunities for group support could be better assessed. An experimental task involving the review of an analysis specification document was performed by 15 teams of college student subjects. Based on the study results, the experimental task was characterized as a complementary task composed of Eureka disjunctive subtasks. Process loss and gain were measured for the review teams. Potential sources for process loss and gain for review teams are discussed, along with the implications for group support.