Comment by TheRealPomax
3 hours ago
A postmortem is for reflecting on something that went so wrong you had to kill it, and you want to objectively describe what led to that, and what lessons can be learnt from the failure.
A retrospective is just the reflecting part, without implying you believe it is going to fail and you're looking for some schadenfreude ;)
This might be terminology that's used differently in different places. For instance, in video games it is extremely common to use "postmortem" to mean "post-shipping."
Example: https://blog.codinghorror.com/game-development-postmortems/ Note the dual emphasis on both "what went right" and "what went wrong," not just one or the other.
But postmortem is literally “post death” in Latin. It’s synonymous with autopsy! I know people misuse borrowed words all the time, but come on?!
> is literally “post death” in Latin
Yes; I think what I described matches that meaning?
Post-death, as in: "it's over," "activity has halted," "no more work being done."
Death does not necessarily have a bad/negative connotation. It's just the end of something.
This is in contrast to the original comment: "something that went so wrong you had to kill it." Death does not imply something went wrong or that it happened forcefully.
I guess "autopsy" generally is talking about "finding the cause of death" so maybe that has a more negative connotation ("something (bad) happened, causing death, let's find it").
Ah, words with their fuzzy meanings (:
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A post mortem is a very common term in many industries on how something went after you shipped it.
You’re taking it very literally here, it does not involve anything being dead or killed.
We’ve used this in the software, games, film and construction industries for decades at this point.
Substitute Mortem for Ship and that’s how people use it.
From the article:
> The goal of a postmortem is to draw meaningful conclusions to help you learn from your past successes and failures. Despite its grim-sounding name, a postmortem can be an extremely productive method of improving your development practices.
I've been reading people use "postmortem" to describe software retrospectives for like... 15+ years.
Mostly in the opensource, or marketing-blog spaces. The detailed investigation and fix report was a favorite genre of blogpost. And if someone's bragging about the design of an enhancement, or investigating a bug, then the overall product isn't dead. They're (usually) not talking shit to anyone. It's the bug that's dead. Or security indecent that's over. Or a schedule milestone that's "dead and burred".
It's a 1 chili pepper level of spicy to use a slang term that relates to death. I'd never read it as hoping someone fails. I think people let the corpotalk center of the brain overreact to anything that's not couched in euphemism.
In the specific case of ship retrospectives, I prefer to call them “postpartums”.
I guess they’re saying their shipped code is DOA?