Small Teams More Efficient Than Large Teams

Carl Erickson shares in this blog post a study done on 564 information systems projects that seems to indicate that smaller teams are more efficient than larger teams. Small teams were defined with less than 5 people and large teams with more than 20 people. To complete projects of 100,000 equivalent source lines of code the large teams just barely (by a week or so) beat the small teams. It presents also more interesting data about this study. Communication costs and defect rate are the causes that should explain higher costs for larger teams.