Postmortem reviews: purpose and approaches in software engineering

Conducting postmortems is a simple and practical method for organisational learning. Yet, not many companies have implemented such practices, and in a survey, few expressed satisfaction with how postmortems were conducted. In this article, we discuss the importance of postmortem reviews as a method for knowledge sharing in software projects, and give an overview of known such processes in the field of software engineering. In particular, we present three lightweight methods for conducting postmortems found in the literature, and discuss what criteria companies should use in defining their way of conducting postmortems.