Introduction to the Team Software Process(SM)

10The Postmortem

The postmortem is the final step in the TSPi process. Here, you review the team’s work to ensure that you have completed all the needed tasks and recorded all the required data. You also reexamine what you did in this cycle, both to learn what went right and wrong and to see how to do the job better the next time.

Perhaps the best way to describe the principle behind the postmortem is with a definition: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” [Brown]. This definition captures the spirit of the postmortem process. If we do not change the way we work, we continue to perform much as we have in the past. The postmortem provides an orderly way to identify areas that need to be improved and ...