Digital Dave

Moving through a project will present unforeseeable challenges. The key is learning from those challenges and passing them on to everyone involved with the development of the project. Most likely the challenges that occur in one project will rise in another project and if you can present these to a group of developers before a project is in full motion maybe you can save yourself a headache or two.

But let’s not focus soley on what went wrong. It is very easy to nitpick and critize everything we do or didn’t do. What did we do right?

Writing a post mortem is about uncovering these key challenges so we can learn from them, but also our highest acomplishments so we can teach others. Even as a independent developer I reflect on what I did wrong and what I did right when I complete a project. I write these down so later I can revisit these documents to reflect. That reflection will influence my direction and hopefully help me create a better product in the future.

So I take a couple sheets of paper and answer two deceivingly easy questions -

1. List your top 5 items you feel went right with the project?
2. List your top 5 items you feel went wrong with the project?

From there I look at each technology I ended up using and making a note of my biggest challenge with that particular tech. This will give me a heads up in the future in case I mysteriously forgot that ‘thing’ that took me a week to implement.

That’s the key. Once you fire up a new project look back at your post mortems so you can refresh your mind on what you have done right or wrong in the past.