Postmortems in software projects
About postmortems:
The difference between an organization with a culture of postmortems and one without can be dramatic. This is probably in part because of the good effects of postmortems, and in part because companies that lack the discipline to perform postmortems tend to be at a rather chaotic level of practice. When postmortems are institutionalized, you’ll find people saying things like “we organize our source code tree this way, because we’ve found in the past that it works well” or “we stopped using that particular risk assessment practice because it just wasn’t giving us any useful information.” Without postmortems, developers are more likely to invent techniques as they go along, without much regard for what may or may not have worked in the past - and more likely to be surprised when something fails for the second (or third, or tenth) time.
