Benefits of Conducting a Post-Mortem

The project is complete and customers are using the code you wrote. Reflecting on the individual and team experiences serves these purposes:

• It helps the team members better understand how they work as part of a team ” specifically , how they worked as part of this team.

• It helps the team members understand their strengths and weaknesses in different technical areas and points out what they learned, and what they might want to learn.

• It gives the team a chance to improve their process by reflecting on the whole project.

There are several post-mortems throughout a project. Each iteration typically has a post-mortem ”the Iteration Assessments. Part of each assessment is devoted to reviewing the process for the iteration and making mid-project adjustments. The post-mortem review at the end of the project lets the team take a more global view of the process, as a whole, and examine those process elements that worked and those that didn't work. From the viewpoint of process, the post-mortem review is one of the most important activities the team can do ” a process that doesn't change is a dead process!