Software Development Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a software development project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of building and shipping a software product or feature set.
What a Lessons Learned is
A lessons learned is what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Lessons Learned. On a software development project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Software Development project
Software Development projects live or die on building and shipping a software product or feature set. A well-built lessons learned gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how software development projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Software Development-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail software development projects:
- Scope creep
- Technical debt slowing delivery
- Third-party dependency risk
Example
On a real software development project, the lessons learned would be shaped by building and shipping a software product or feature set. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — scope creep, technical debt slowing delivery, third-party dependency risk — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.