"This means, try to produce a high-quality, solid baseline of code early on in the project which stands you in good stead for later iterations. If bugs and new features start to creep in, you can allocate significant developer time without impacting on deadlines," he said.

Fixing broken windows quickly, isolating third-party frameworks, automating governance and ensuring peer review are all vital aspects to successful development projects, according to Granell.

"It is also important to spend the time getting a good framework in place that is built to organizational standards, as this will gain you much more than it costs in the application development stage," he said

Lessons aside, all four of the projects, Granell said, would have been easier and more effective had the teams been able to use some of the newer Microsoft development technologies such as Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server, and the Microsoft Software Factory initiative.

"The software factories initiative lowers the bar for building specific tools for a particular development team. Typically in the past, the effort required to provide custom tools to the developers was just too much, and there had to be a very large amount of repetition to be able to justify the level of investment," he said.