Reflecting on Evidence-Based Timelines

Project retrospectives can be powerful tools for project teams to collectively identify communication gaps and practices to improve for future projects. However, even if project members take the time for a retrospective, it can be hard to correctly remember and jointly discuss past events in a constructive way. Fact-based timelines that visualize a project's events offer a possible solution

IT Project Retrospectives: Learning from the Past through a Program of Action Research

Project management has emerged as a strong discipline practiced by highly trained, certified professionals as organizations have come to realize they cannot stay in business if they cannot manage their projects effectively. However, most companies are still unable or unwilling to perform the most basic of continuous improvement activities – identifying and learning from past mistakes and successes. To help address this shortcoming, this paper provides a framework for conducting project retrospectives that has evolved through the analysis of 130 IT projects over the past ten years. By integrating the findings of several previous studies, the paper provides guidance on mapping project momentum, evaluating project success, identifying and avoiding classic mistakes through best practices, performing root cause analysis, and delivering actionable recommendations

The use of post mortem analysis in game development

Post mortem analysis (PMA) is a method of development retrospection that has found its way into software development. PMA was the topic of a number of research papers in the 90s and early 2000s, but the research has since moved on to other subjects, despite leaving the discussion on some areas of PMA unfinished. Notably, the unsatisfactory rate of PMA adoption in the industry was identified but not addressed, while the new lightweight method of PMA was developed but not revisited with experience from the industry. PMA research is also very limited on the subject of game development, despite its interesting and unorthodox ways of utilizing PMA reports. The thesis aims to study the adoption of PMA in the game industry, with a focus on the game industry’s PMA adoption rate and the PMA methods currently being used. Software development has trended towards more agile methodologies in the last decades and game development industry in particular is often noted to only use very lightweight or even ad-hoc methodologies during development, so the game industry offers a good viewpoint for studying if the traditional PMA methods are still in use and how they may have changed over the years. Besides examining PMA adoption and methods in modern game development, this thesis also goes through the uses of PMA reports in game development. Game developers have publicly released hundreds of PMA reports, which is not a common practice in traditional PMA. The goals that the game developers have for the public reports also differ from the traditional ones. This thesis will focus particularly on public PMA report usage in game development research and the thesis will include a literature analysis on several game development research papers. The analysis shows that the game development research on PMA reports is consistent with other research and that it can also be complementary to other research, though limited in the discussed topics. The study also features a questionnaire survey aimed at Finnish game industry professionals. The survey helps to answer the research questions of this thesis as it shows that PMA is a common practice and that the PMA method in modern game development has some similarities with traditional methods though it has adopted new lightweight practices in some aspects. The survey also brings to light that even though public PMA reports are well known in the games industry, the common uses for PMA reports in the industry have not changed from the orthodox uses presented in the prior research

Knowledge management in learning software SMMEs in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2017.The study investigated the nature and causes of software development failures and knowledge management practices adopted to mitigate the failures in small, micro, and medium software developing enterprises (SMMEs) in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The study adopted an interpretive, qualitative multiple case study approach to investigate the problem. Twelve software development SMMEs were involved in the study. Interviews were conducted with 12 information technology (IT)/software development project managers and eight software developers identified through purposive sampling. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse and interpret the data. The findings reveal that software development SMMEs in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, experience software development failures. Ten causes of failure were identified. They are bureaucracy in IT departments, compatibility issues, complacency of developers, involvement of the wrong people in the planning stages of projects, a lack of detailed documentation, lack of resources, lack of user commitment/non-adoption of systems, miscommunication/misrepresentation of requirements, unrealistic customer expectations, and work overload. The results also indicate that software organisations and individual software developers experience knowledge gaps during the course of their work. Six knowledge management practices are adopted by the organisations and the individual developers to fill the knowledge gaps. The practices are knowledge acquisition, creation, storage, sharing, organisation and application. These practices are supported by Internet technologies such as blogs, Wikis, search engines, social networks, organisational databases and computer hardware such as servers and personal computers. The study reveals two important knowledge management practices that are ignored by software organisations, namely post-mortem reviews, which are essential in software development, and formal training of the developers. The findings further reveal that knowledge management has enabled the organisations and individual developers to save time, retain their intellectual property (IP), become more efficient and effective in knowledge reuse. Organisations face a number of knowledge management related challenges. The challenges are lack of formal knowledge management procedures, difficulty protecting knowledge, expensive knowledge storage costs, increasing information needs, lack of the time to fully adopt knowledge management practices, difficulty finding information, and the ever-changing nature of knowledge. The study concluded that software development failures are prevalent in software SMMEs and that the organisations have informally adopted knowledge management. Moreover, knowledge management has brought benefits to the organisations but the role played by knowledge management in eliminating project failures is not clear. It is recommended that software organisations should consider formally adopting knowledge management so that knowledge management specialists can be employed to drive the knowledge management initiatives and so help in conducting post-mortem reviews and the training of staff. In addition, further research is recommended to investigate the role of knowledge management in reducing or eliminating software project failures. Quantitative studies are also recommended to objectively measure the benefits brought by knowledge management. Such studies would measure how much time and which costs are saved by adopting knowledge management. The study contributes to theory and practice (software development industry). Theoretically, the study developed and used a conceptual framework developed from software engineering and knowledge management that could be used to investigate knowledge management activities in organisations. The study also contributes to the existing body of knowledge on the subject software learning organisations from a developing country perspective. It is envisaged that software development organisations will adopt the recommendations proffered to improve their knowledge management practices