Discovering the Relation Between Project Factors and Project Success in Post-mortem Evaluations

Post-mortem project reviews often yield useful lessons learned. These project reviews are mostly recorded in plain text. This makes it difficult to derive useful overall findings from a set of such post-mortem reviews, for example to monitor and guide a software process improvement program. We have developed a five-step method to transform the qualitative, natural language type information present in those reports into quantitative information. This quantitative information can be analyzed statistically and related to other types of quantitative projectspecific information. In this paper we discuss the method, and show the results of applying it in the setting of a large industrustrial software process improvement initiative.