Facilitating experience reuse among software project managers
Information Sciences: an International Journal
Applying empirical software engineering to software architecture: challenges and lessons learned
Empirical Software Engineering
Software project effort assessment
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
ReBEC: a method for capturing experience during software development projects
EKAW'10 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Knowledge engineering and management by the masses
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The most popular unit of work in organizations is a project. Managing knowledge in and about projects is salient for successful project management. Explicit knowledge is easier to manage than tacit knowledge as it is an outcome of work. Tacit knowledge is abstract and is managed in a cursory mode in projects. In this paper, we will discuss how postmortems can be used to capture tacit experiences in projects. Conducting a postmortem, either after a milestone or at the end of a project, is salient in order to gauge what has been learnt, what were the main issues faced, and what can be used to improve the processes of work in the future. The conducting of postmortems aids in articulation of tacit experiences into explicit forms, this enables for experiences to be better re-used in the future. Re-using of postmortem findings depends heavily on the nature of the postmortem outcome. We will compare two kinds of postmortem outcomes - traditional reports and stories. Management must choose the right kind of postmortem report to calibrate depending on the project and learning outcomes. We also highlight lessons learnt from conducting postmortem reviews in several software organizations.