aped-pre-mortem

Pre-mortem risk analysis prevents late-stage surprises by generating ranked failure scenarios before implementation. It reads existing PRD, architecture, and epics artefacts to anchor the review, then scores likelihood and impact across technical, scope, integration, process, and user risk categories.

Pre-mortem analysis is needed during the PRD, architecture, and epics stage of product planning. It forces a structured review of how a project could plausibly fail before implementation starts, turning risky assumptions into a ranked, mitigated list of failure scenarios.

The best way to identify failure modes in epics planning is independent risk brainstorming across technical, scope, integration, process, and user risk categories. Scoring likelihood by impact produces a mitigation table for highest-priority risks and writes a pre-mortem report for downstream use.

Yes, pre-mortem mitigation planning reads your current PRD, architecture, and epics artefacts to anchor the analysis in the actual plan. It produces a mitigation table for the highest-priority risks and feeds downstream epics and verification checks.

Yes, pre-mortem risk ranking covers integration and process risks, along with technical, scope, and user risk categories. It scores likelihood and impact for each generated failure scenario, produces mitigations, and documents acceptance of residual risks in a downstream pre-mortem report.

A pre-mortem approach for risk analysis is limited to the planning stage and depends on existing PRD, architecture, and epics artefacts. It generates hypothetical failure scenarios and mitigations but cannot predict every issue, meaning some residual risks must be formally accepted.