Background: Research on teams originated from the social sciences and brought a number of new topics into the repertoire of software engineering. Teams and teamwork are recognized for the promised benefits of i.e. increased performance. Performance is often linked to experience gains, and along with individual learning teamwork facilitates what is recognized as group learning. Aims: In this paper, we report our lessons learned from an attempt to study the relationship between group learning and performance in a large-scale software project.
Method:We conducted an exploratory case study of an on-going large-scale distributed project in Ericsson. The data collected included archival data and both unstructured and semi-structured interviews. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, charts and regression analysis.
Results:The results suggest that some teams improved their performance over time until they were forced to work cooperate with several other teams. However, it is not completely clear role of accumulated experience and other aspects, such as team stability and number of developers. Conclusions: We believe that ad-hoc team formation and team member rotation might have resulted in a failure to benefit from group learning. In addition, the fact that developers worked simultaneously on different tasks could have hindered their performance. However, we believe that further research must be conducted to provide a stronger evidence about the identified result. Based on the experience acquired by conducting this study, we report some lessons learned that can support researchers and practitioners when investigating the topic addressed in this paper.