A post-mortem also has the benefit of hindsight. Decisions that were clear and definite at the time might not make much sense when viewed with data obtained later in the project's lifespan. There's also an issue with "selective memory" where something might not be remembered with the same clarity, or may be conflated with other events. Confident statements like "We knew this one thing wouldn't have worked" might actually have been "We weren't sure if this would work so we tried several things. They all didn't work.". Consider anyone writing about their past as an unreliable narrator. True, they may be the best and most knowledgeable narrator we have, but they do not have an objective perspective on whatever they were creating. They have their own biases and reasons for the stories they present in a post-mortem. Treat a post-mortem like you would treat an auto-biography of a famous person: a primary source with an agenda to show the subject in the best way possible.
-There's nothing wrong with reading a post-mortem about a project -- we can learn a great deal about how a project is run (or shouldn't be run) and what pitfalls to be aware of if we go down a similar path, but understand that you're reading one account (whether by one person or one team of people). They have the perspective of someone deep in the conflict. You're looking at their recollections of tactics, not the overall strategy that brought that them to the place.
+There's nothing wrong with reading a post-mortem about a project --- we can learn a great deal about how a project is run (or shouldn't be run) and what pitfalls to be aware of if we go down a similar path, but understand that you're reading one account (whether by one person or one team of people). They have the perspective of someone deep in the conflict. You're looking at their recollections of tactics, not the overall strategy that brought that them to the place.
## Ranking programmers
projects / themediocreprogrammer.git / blobdiff