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Augmenting Experience Reports with Lightweight Postmortem Reviews

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Product Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2188))

Abstract

Many small and medium-sized companies that develop software experience the same problems repeatedly, and have few systems in place to learn from their own mistakes as well as their own successes. Here, we propose a lightweight method to collect experience from completed software projects, and compare the results of this method to more widely applied experience reports. We find that the new method captures more information about core processes related to software development in contrast to experience reports that focus more on management processes.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge colleagues in the PROFIT project for providing a stimulating research environment, as well as our contact persons in Northern and Southern software. We are very grateful to Stefan Biffl at the University of Vienna, Reidar Conradi at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology as well as the anonymous reviews, for helpful comments on this paper. Furthermore, we are grateful to Geir Kjetil Hanssen at Sintef Informatics who managed part of the Lightweight Postmortem Review at Southern Software, and who made important contributions to the analysis. This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council under project 137901/221.

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dingsøyr, T., Moe, N.B., Nytrø, Ø. (2001). Augmenting Experience Reports with Lightweight Postmortem Reviews. In: Bomarius, F., Komi-Sirviö, S. (eds) Product Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2188. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44813-6_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44813-6_17

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42571-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44813-6

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