Post-mortems on the living

This Gamasutra article lists a load of problems with project post-mortems, and proposes Critical Stage Analysis as an alternative. It’s a bit heavy on the problems with post-mortems, and I’m not sure I agree with all of them. In non-games development it’s more common for largely the same team to work on the next revision of a similar product, giving more chance for lessons to be learnt rather than forgotten, and lack of ownership of the problems is just as likely if critical stage analysis isn’t implemented properly.

However, I agree that critical stage analysis is an improvement over post-mortems; it’s basically mini-post-mortems at each milestone, which means there’s an opportunity to improve things during a project, rather than just after it, and problems early on in a project are more likely to be remembered as they’re still fresh in the mind. The idea of rating the importance of each issue is a good one too.