Whether you are a lone-wolf programmer or part of a larger team, postmortems will help you maximize the benefits gained from your hard-earned experience. On large projects you can even conduct a mini-postmortem after each milestone, allowing you to profit from what you've learned as soon as possible. One final benefit of conducting a postmortem is that you gain a very gratifying sense of closure because you actually document all the personal growth you've experienced as a result of completing the project.

If you wish to view a sample postmortem from my company's last project, visit www.dexterity.com/postmortem. I included the complete text of the postmortem and well as a sample project questionnaire you can use in conducting your own postmortems.

Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software

Copyright © 2000 by Steve Pavlina. Email: stevep@dexterity.com