Every release cycle in Fedora I see folks use the term postmortem to refer to discussions after the release that focus on analysing what happened during the release, with a focus on fixing mistakes and repeating successes. This is a neologism borrowed from domains such as business.
Humans are wordy people, and the effects of a word that contains “mort” in it is to be focused on death. A postmortem is an autopsy – it can only be conducted on something after it is dead. That’s the very definition of the word. In using it, we talk about the body of our work while implying death. Not healthy!
I get that it has a popular usage, but why follow the trend and refer to our release process as death? It’s not even a lifecycle, it’s many lifecycles. It’s an ecosystem. Fedora is a living project with a regular rhythm. The only death we see are ideas, both good and bad, before their time, or just in time, or long overdue.
Some alternatives to postmortem:
- Post-analysis
- Release review
- Post-game analysis (sports metaphor)
- Sanity check
- Pause for the cause
- Happy hour
- Post-release analysis
- Release feedback
- Post-release loopback
- After the fact
- Hindsight meeting
- Safety check
- Loopback review
10 Comments
Eh, words are just words, and ‘postmortem’ is a commonly used term, e.g. in game development. I don’t tend to think of it as referring to death. But if I were to choose an alternative, I’d go for ‘post-game analysis’. No need to invent new terms when something appropriate already exists.
I’m in favor of the simple “debrief”…. Although “feedback loop” might appeal to the EE-types in the crowd, too.
How about After-Action Report or AAR?
We use the term “360 review” as in coming full circle back to the start.
Lessons learned?
Reading the river?
Harvest festival?
I liken the process to the creation of a a robust topiary garden. It’s part planning, part shaping, and part trimming to encourage wild things to grow into a larger, organized whole.
Or maybe its more akin to the art of penjing or saikei…
But I don’t have a handy verb that expresses the multifacetted aspects of act of shaping while simultaneously growing when creating topiary.
“Lessons learned” is another one that I hear. It may have become too “corporate” or bureaucreatic-sounding for some people’s ears, e.g. the US army has a specific “lessons learned” organization:
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/mission.asp
but I think it’s still a useful term that isn’t yet a cliche.
I have another addition, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotwash
I just read my own link and it referred to other terms i. Lessons Learned ii. After Action Review
I quite like “Lessons Learned”.
I’ve heard project managers use “lessons learned” in place of “postmortem”
I think the word you’re searching for is “retrospective”, as used by Agile practitioners. Simple, straightforward, means what it says, minimal stigma.