Influence of Group Cohesion and Information Sharing on Effectiveness of Design Review

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. A full factorial design of experiments (3×3, DOE) is conducted to investigate the influence of group cohesion and the awareness of the presence of unshared information among group members on design review effectiveness. The results suggest that awareness may have an effect on locating design issues by representation, functional group domain, and the total amount of design issues located.