Technical and Managerial Diﬃculties in Postmortem Analysis in Software Projects Felipe J. R. Vieira , Manoela R. Oliveira (B ) , Rog´ erio P. C. do Nascimento , and Michel S. Soares Federal University of Sergipe, Av. Marechal Rondon, s/n - Jardim Rosa Elze, S˜aoCrist´ov˜ao,Brazil felipejrvieira@gmail.com, manoelareisoliveira@gmail.com, {rogerio,michel}@dcomp.ufs.br Abstract. Software is successfully applied in a wide variety of areas. However, software projects have suﬀered from poor reputation by repeat- edly bursting deadlines, costs or failing to fully meet user requirements. Postmortem Analysis is an activity to analyze what happened in projects in search of understanding the failures occurred and the achieved suc- cesses. Despite bringing interesting data for improving future projects, Postmortem Analysis is often neglected in organizations. This article seeks to identify and analyze the technical and managerial diﬃculties that exist in its accomplishment through bibliographical research. As a result, it is possible to conclude that the main diﬃculties for realiz- ing postmortem activities are the shortage of time, lack of management support, conﬂicts between stakeholders, diﬃculty in extracting and col- lecting data, lack of agreement regarding evaluation criteria, lack of stan- dards for achievement, and lack of useful or eﬃcient historical data. Keywords: Postmortem · Organizational learning · Software project 1 Introduction Software is successfully applied in a wide variety of areas. It supports and facili- tates the activities of individuals and organizations in their daily routines. Mod- ern world is highly dependent on software. However, software projects have been suﬀering from poor reputation [13, 17, 22, 23] by repeatedly bursting deadlines, costs or failing to fully meet user requirements. There are reports of software ﬂaws reaching billions of dollars, as well as failures that have caused accidents and damage to human life [7, 8, 27]. An approach to understanding the causes of software project failures is to conduct postmortem analysis [3, 6, 14, 21]. This analysis is a collective learning activity which can be organised for projects either when they end a phase or are terminated [10, 14]. The main motivation is to reﬂect on what happened c  Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 S. Misra et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2019, LNCS 11623, pp. 59–69, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24308-1_5