At the conclusion of a lot of projects, we conduct retrospectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the success factors of the project, discuss what could be improved and how to incorporate these into future projects.
How many of these focus around the actual design elements of the software developed? I have not heard of any projects which have had a post-development analysis, so I can only conclude that it is through introspection that good developers learn and improve. I wonder why teams have not done this retrospective analysis, or if they have why I haven’t heard of it.
I am approaching the conclusion of my current project, so I will be keen to try a technical-only retrospective, where we take a look at the various patterns we employed, and how effective they were in solving our problems.