Comparison
Design reviewvsPre-mortem
Design review
you presented the design and spent forty minutes on a question you had not thought to ask yourself.
A scheduled conversation where a design is examined by people who are not building it. Done well it hunts for the assumption nobody stated and the failure mode nobody costed; done badly it is a status meeting with slides, or a place where the most senior voice wins by default. Going in, the useful preparation is not polish but knowing which parts you are least sure about, because those are the only parts worth the room's time.
Full entry →Pre-mortem
before starting, everyone wrote down why this will have failed in six months, and two of the reasons were the same.
A structured exercise where the team imagines the project has already failed and writes the story of how. It works because prospective hindsight loosens tongues: people who would not object to a plan will happily explain a failure, especially in writing and in parallel. The output is a list of risks with owners, and it is cheap enough that skipping it on a large project is hard to justify.
Full entry →