Think Introspective, Not Retrospective -- Why Wait Until the End

by Lynne Nix

Organizations use project retrospectives to assess the success of their development practices and projects. Retrospectives also serve as a closure vehicle for the project team and can be a celebration of good projects -- or a final escape from bad ones. Retrospectives are intended to provide information about where changes in development and project management practices, responsibilities, communications, and deliverables could benefit the next project. Although lessons learned from previous projects remain invaluable when planning the next project, they do not provide timely information to make improvements on a current project. In fact, project retrospectives are about as useful to the team in identifying improvements after the project is complete as doing usability testing after the team completes the code -- you find out what's wrong with the current product at a time when there is not much that can be done about it.