Edit: I was under the impression that postmortem was usually used to mean a discussion of a failure of some sort. I was not aware of the project management version.
Correct.
> Postmortem is the de facto name for blog posts summarising how things went after a, typically, game development jam.
Not just this. Postmortem is a generic Project Management term. A process/meeting after the project's end (or the end of a part of the project) where collaborators discuss what went right/wrong is called a postmortem.
This is formalized by the bible of Project Management, the PMBOK, and Wikipedia has a nice article about the notion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation
Programmer's TL;DR: your scrum sprint retrospective and its "what went wrong" / "what could have been better" is a Postmortem.
Postmortem ("after death") is a term used for diagnosing what went wrong, when something went wrong.
It's the right term to use to report on a service outage on a website, for example.
From Wikipedia project post mortem: "is a process, usually performed at the conclusion of a project, to determine and analyze elements of the project that were successful or unsuccessful. "
Why use "after death"? it's not like latin words don't have meaning...
It's how this term is used already. I remember seeing it as a kid, when I first started dabbling in building games.
If we want to enter fights about prescriptive definitions, then - at the risk of committing tu quoque fallacy - I'd like to ask the JS and nouveau-functional-programming crowd to stop renaming things that already have established names. Signed, Don Quixote.
Conclusion, not unsuccessful conclusion. It's not incorrect to use it for any retrospective for a project that has concluded, regardless of whether it's successful or not.