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Avocet Systems, Inc. : The Complete Solution for Embedded Systems Development Tools
Embedded Update
Project Postmortems

How many of us proactively learn from our failures... and successes?

As important as getting things done, is building an organic, learning engineering department; one whose skills measurably increase with time. One part of this is finishing every engineering project with a formal postmortem analysis.

Conduct a debriefing of all participants. Each should submit a written set of notes regarding the project. Be specific! The engineering manager should not accept non-thoughtful or incomplete responses.

Cover the following areas:

- Scheduling: why did it run late? How could we get it done on time next time? What was the best thing we did? What was the worst thing? Other comments?

- Tools: Is there anything we did wrong as far as tools go? What did we do right? What should we do next time?

- Configuration Management: was there a problem? What was the best thing we did about it? What problems/things to change next time?

- Features: Did we meet all of the feature goals? Did we keep changing the spec? Did significant feature opportunities come up that we elected to skip? What were they, and should we reconsider them?

- Documentation: is it complete? What remains to be done? What should we have done differently?

- Hardware Design: Are we happy with the design? What could we have done better or cheaper? Any concerns about future speed problems, parts availability, or other issues?

- Firmware and Software Design: Are we happy with the code?

- Product design: are we happy with the product, or are we left feeling uncomfortable about it, or about parts of it? Be specific.

- Lurking Issues: Are there any outstanding problems or potential pitfalls? List them.

- Completion: is the product really complete? What else needs to be done?

- What have we learned? What we should do differently next time?

Never use the postmortem to crucify participants for a failed project - it's always better to scold individually, in private. Do use it to tune your processes, to get better at the complicated art of embedded design.