Web Application Development Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a web application development project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of building a custom web application.
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 web application development project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Web Application Development project
Web Application Development projects live or die on building a custom web application. 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 web application development projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Web Application Development-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail web application development projects:
- Unclear or shifting requirements
- Technical debt
- Security and performance at scale
Example
On a real web application development project, the lessons learned would be shaped by building a custom web application. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — unclear or shifting requirements, technical debt, security and performance at scale — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.