When beginning a software project, can be rather daunting. You’re essentially staring down the barrel of a lot of challenges, concerns, and logistical headaches, especially if features you’re implementing take you down paths that are rarely if ever, tread. Planning a development project or a scope of a project is an art and skill all to itself, one that many individual developers, as well as teams, tend to struggle with.
There are countless horror stories in the software industry where poor planning led to a perpetual development nightmare, with the project often going unfinished, or becoming a broken mess in the end. This is often referred to as “development hell”, and while poor planning isn’t the only thing that can lead to this, it’s usually the primary culprit. Defining the scope of the project, understanding all of the logistics and needs, and working out a schedule to implement all of these concerns is truly a terrifying task.
At least, it’s a daunting task if you let it be one. In truth, if you just take the necessary time to think it through, and be logical, planning isn’t that bad. The key to being a successful project planner is all about research, learning from others who have had success, and applying that. It’s just like anything else, trying to figure it out on your own with no input from experienced sources is going to lead you nowhere.
Today, we’re going to talk about project planning, scope definition, and everything else that should be laid out, organized, and easily measured. You’ll see it’s not that bad, at least if you take each aspect one at a time, tackling them as singular challenges. Don’t think about the entire scope as a monolithic thing, just to get one step at a time, with each step being the sole challenge in your world when it comes to the project.
Defining the Primary Features and Purposes of the Software
The most important thing to do, first of all, is to truly understand the primary purpose of the software. What should the software achieve, and in what way should it achieve it? This may seem very obvious, but many projects have failed due to losing sight of the goal, or not realizing the needs related to achieving that ultimate goal.
With the realization of the primary goal/function of the software, consider the platform. When considering the platform through which you should achieve this ultimate, primary goal, you have a basic understanding, as far as programming goes, of what you have to do to succeed. Exactly what approach is necessary, with the platform and language, to construct something that achieves the function intended.
Considering Extra Features and Functions in the Scope of a Project
Now that you have a basic understanding of the journey you will have to take, as far as the big picture with coding, to achieve the primary functions intended by the software, and how you will achieve those through the platform and language in question, similarly consider the secondary features.
Work out the basic things you will have to make possible within the established rules you previously figured out, to make the secondary features work. These should always be a lesser priority, their planning and design focusing on achieving their goals within the rules which the primary functionality sets. Make sure that implementing these doesn’t cause extra steps in creating the main functionality, and that they don’t become a project as big as or bigger than the primary goal.
Avoiding NIHS
Not Invented Here Syndrome, another common bogeyman not unlike development hell, is something that you should plan to avoid. This can be achieved by looking at the hurdles and challenges discovered in the previous steps, and considering external libraries or existing open-source, free-licensed snippets of code that you can integrate into your project to achieve things more efficiently.
It’s very easy to fall down the rabbit hole of sub-projects to create components and frameworks that already exist. You can save a lot of time and headaches by simply adopting properly-licensed API, libraries, and code. Do not fall into the developer mentality of every line of code having to be original to the project.
Considering Other Specialties in the Scope of a Project
Now you know, generally, what you have to achieve and figure out for the primary functionality, and you know what you have to do to achieve secondary functionality without interfering with the main purpose of the program. You also have a list of potential libraries, snippets of code, and other APIs that you can utilize to make development faster and cleaner.
Now, look at all of this. Consider if it involves disciplines or skills that maybe you or your existing team don’t have. Perhaps it requires somebody who has a more significant understanding of math, or somebody more intimately familiar with some of those imported libraries. Perhaps you need a skilled interface designer, which is very common when dealing with web or mobile applications. Despite the simplicity of mobile and web interfaces, at least visually, they can be tricky to design due to accounting for various screen sizes and aspect ratios with those platforms!
Acquire people with the skills before you begin actual development. In cases where people of these skills refuse to work on projects that have nothing to show for themselves, at least have a simplistic flowchart of how the programming will function within the program, showing them that you know how to make the software work.
Scheduling
All right, now you have the people you need, if you need anyone, you have the resources to speed things up, and you generally know what you have to do to make everything work. That’s terrific! But you have a deadline, one way or another. If it’s a personal project or a freelance project with no client to answer to, you still need to have it working within a specific amount of time, and amount of time that you should choose.
In the professional world, the powers that be will most likely pass down a deadline, though if they are wise, they will consult with you and your team first. This is a challenging one, figuring out how long it will take to implement the functionality, how long any specialist team members will take to create the elements you need, and how important elements are to achieving certain stages in development.
There is no definitive answer to this one, unfortunately. The best approach is to consider the main functionality of the program, and how you can get it visibly working without the “bells and whistles”, and without the secondary features. Estimate how long it will take to write the simplest, most stable form of that as a foundation from which to build the rest of the program. Be liberal with your estimation, especially if there are challenges that you aren’t sure how to solve yet.
When you have a fix on this, and you have consulted with your team and any specialists, it’s relatively easy to figure out how long it will take to flesh out the program, get the secondary features working, and refine it into a final product.
Again, be liberal with this, and overestimate by about 30%. That’s right, you should use Mr. Scott from Star Trek as an example, claiming that getting something operational will take longer than it winds up taking. He would have made a good developer, had he cut down on the scotch just a little!
Planning Out the Project
Now that you have a timeframe, and you know what has to be done, plot it out in stages. The first aid should be to get that core functionality operational with some sort of visible way to show that it does indeed work. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t even have to be easy to operate, it just has to work.
The next step should be to implement the most important secondary features, if there are any, into that same bare-bones construct. At this point, you have the software operational, it’s just not very pleasant yet.
By the time you begin implementing bare-bones versions of the secondary features, any specialists creating algorithms, libraries, interfaces with existing libraries, UI elements, or what have you should be well on their way to producing such.
From there, each step should be goals for implementing better interfaces, streamlining the existing infrastructure any way you can, and implementing better solutions wherever possible. From that point, it’s all about user testing and refining in the traditional prototype phases of Alpha, Beta, release candidates, and finally, a final version.
Learn more about the scope of a project, defining your digital product here
Conclusion
So, what do you need to prepare and complete a software project? You need a recipe – a definition of primary and secondary functionality, an understanding of what you can use to make this implementation faster, access to people who can produce components that your team or you as an individual may not, and then a plan with milestones, achieving implementation of everything, refining of everything, etc.
Will this make you a master programmer? No, there’s way more to it than that, but you certainly have the project planned out, and have the resources you need to get there!
If you have doubts about how to define the scope of a project, we are here to advise you on everything you need and accompany you at each stage. Leave us your information and let’s start working together.