Post Partum

Listen, Code, Test, Design. These are the four Extreme practices as expressed by KentBeck.

You listen to many things -- the code, your pair, your customers. Another thing that is important to listen to is the team itself.

It is important to have regular, semi-formal feedback sessions to evaluate how the team is doing. How is your development approach working out? How are your tools working out?

The DoIt team tries to apply this practice at the end of each DevelopmentInterval -- not that they always succeed. The team sits around a table and asks the following questions:

• What worked well?

• What didn't work so well?

• What do we want to do differently next time?

We decided that calling this session a PostMortem was just too depressing, and so used the term PostPartum instead.

I especially like this term because it so effectively captures the ambiguity of your feelings at this time. Ecstatic that software has been delivered, but at the same time a little disconnected and sad... -- BillBarnett