Mini Postmortems

by Ed Yourdon

The notion of a "postmortem" is familiar to most software developers and project managers: at the end of an application development project, a report is written to document the good, the bad, and the ugly experiences, so that future projects can learn and improve. In theory, it's a useful concept; in practice, it's largely ignored. It may be an official part of the organization's project methodology, but the reality is that by the time the project finishes, most of the key technical team members have been reassigned to other projects -- or have quit, looking for greener pastures. If the project has dragged on for a year or longer, hardly anyone can remember what transpired in the early days of the project (when all the fatal mistakes were made), and everyone is so burned out and exhausted that they have little or no interest in the concept anyway. As a result, the postmortem process has been a dismal failure in most organizations, even when it does take place.