Abstract
A central issue in knowledge management and software process improvement is to learn from experience. In software engineering, most experience is gathered in projects, which makes project experience a prime source for learning. Many companies conduct postmortem reviews, but we have found few companies that analyze the outcome of several reviews to facilitate learning on an organizational level. This paper reports an explorative study of what we can learn from analyzing postmortem review reports of twelve projects in a medium-size software company.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Victor, R.B.: Quantitative Evaluation of Software Engineering Methodology. In: Proceedings of the First Pan Pacific Computer Conference, Melbourne, Australia (1985)
Victor, R.B., Caldiera, G., Dieter Rombach, H.: The Experience Factory. In: Marciniak, J.J. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Software Engineering, vol. 1, pp. 469–476. John Wiley, Chichester (1994)
Birk, A., Dingsøyr, T., Stålhane, T.: Postmortem: Never leave a project without it. IEEE Software, special issue on knowledge management in software engineering 19(3), 43–45 (2002)
Cohen, J.: A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement 20, 37–46 (1960)
Dingsøyr, T.: Postmortem reviews: Purpose and Approaches in Software Engineering. Information and Software Technology 47(5), 293–303 (2005)
Dingsøyr, T., Conradi, R.: A Survey of Case Studies of the Use of Knowledge Management in Software Engineering. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering 12(4), 391–414 (2002)
Dingsøyr, T., Moe, N.B., Nytrø, Ø.: Augmenting Experience Reports with Lightweight Postmortem Reviews. In: Bomarius, F., Komi-Sirviö, S. (eds.) PROFES 2001. LNCS, vol. 2188, pp. 167–181. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
El Emam, K.: Benchmarking Kappa: Interrater Agreement in Software Process Assessments. Empirical Software Engineering 4(2), 113–133 (1999)
Garvin, D.: Building a Learning Organization. Harvard Business Review, pp. 78–91 (July-August 1993)
Huber, G.P.: Organizational Learning: The Contributing Processes and the Literatures. Organizational Science 2(1), 88–115 (1991)
Norman, L.K.: Project retrospectives: a handbook for team reviews. Dorset House Publishing, New York (2001)
Krippendorff, K.: Content Analysis, an Introduction to Its Methodology. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA (1980)
Krippendorff, K.: Computing Krippendorff’s alpha-reliability (2006)
McConnell, S.: Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA, USA (1996)
Paulk, M.C., Weber, C.V., Curtis, B., Chrissis, M.B.: The Capability maturity model: guidelines for improving the software process. Addison-Wesley, Boston (1995)
Raelin, J.A.: Public Reflection as the Basis of Learning. Management Learning 32(1), 11–30 (2001)
Schalken, J.J.P., Brinkkemper, S., van Vliet, J.C.: A Method to Draw Lessons from Project Postmortem Databases. Software Process: Improvement and Practice 79(1), 120–131 (2006)
Scupin, R.: The KJ Method: A Technique for Analyzing Data Derived from Japanese ethnology. Human Organization 56(2), 233–237 (1997)
Straker, D.: A Toolbook for Quality Improvement and Problem Solving. Prentice hall International (UK) Limited (1995)
Strauss, A., Corbin, J.: Basics of Qualitative Research, 2nd edn. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks (1998)
Yin, R.K.: Case Study Research: design and methods, 5th edn. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dingsøyr, T., Moe, N.B., Schalken, J., Stålhane, T. (2007). Organizational Learning Through Project Postmortem Reviews – An Explorative Case Study. In: Abrahamsson, P., Baddoo, N., Margaria, T., Messnarz, R. (eds) Software Process Improvement. EuroSPI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4764. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75381-0_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75381-0_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74765-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75381-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)