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Agree. Stop using postmortem for neutral retrospectives.

Postmortem ("after death") is a term used for diagnosing what went wrong, when something went wrong.

It's the right term to use to report on a service outage on a website, for example.

From Wikipedia project post mortem: "is a process, usually performed at the conclusion of a project, to determine and analyze elements of the project that were successful or unsuccessful. "

Why use "after death"? it's not like latin words don't have meaning...




Prescriptive vs. descriptive.

It's how this term is used already. I remember seeing it as a kid, when I first started dabbling in building games.

If we want to enter fights about prescriptive definitions, then - at the risk of committing tu quoque fallacy - I'd like to ask the JS and nouveau-functional-programming crowd to stop renaming things that already have established names. Signed, Don Quixote.


"…usually performed at the conclusion of a project…"

Conclusion, not unsuccessful conclusion. It's not incorrect to use it for any retrospective for a project that has concluded, regardless of whether it's successful or not.


But did it die? Is it referring to "after the lifetime" of the project, rather than during?


You could think of it as "death of the author". Also could be thought of as death of production.


The game jam is over, and so is dead.




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