Technical and Managerial Difficulties in Postmortem Analysis in Software Projects

摘要

Software is successfully applied in a wide variety of areas. However, software projects have suffered from poor reputation by repeatedly bursting deadlines, costs or failing to fully meet user requirements. Postmortem Analysis is an activity to analyze what happened in projects in search of understanding the failures occurred and the achieved successes. Despite bringing interesting data for improving future projects, Postmortem Analysis is often neglected in organizations. This article seeks to identify and analyze the technical and managerial difficulties that exist in its accomplishment through bibliographical research. As a result, it is possible to conclude that the main difficulties for realizing postmortem activities are the shortage of time, lack of management support, conflicts between stakeholders, difficulty in extracting and collecting data, lack of agreement regarding evaluation criteria, lack of standards for achievement, and lack of useful or efficient historical data.