Organizational Learning through Project Postmortem Reviews – An Explorative Case Study

A central issue in knowledge management and software process improvement is to learn from experience. In software engineering, most experience is gathered in projects, which makes project experience a prime source for learning. Many companies conduct postmortem reviews, but we have found few companies that analyze the outcome of several reviews to facilitate learning on an organizational level. This paper reports an explorative study of what we can learn from analyzing postmortem review reports of twelve projects in a medium-size software company.