Planning a Software Development Project: Steps to Follow

Software Development Planning is a preliminary step to start with Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Software Planning is divisible into six to eight steps based on the size of the organization, or the size of the project: Initializing an idea/Idea generation, Feasibility Analysis, planning, designing, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining.

Even as you abide by the SDLC, a successful piece of software requires careful introspection. It rarely comes by accident. It certainly requires a pile of planning and other essential steps to go by. It is required to prepare a team with clear objectives, purpose, schedule, deliverables, and revisions before erecting a project.

What is a Software Development Plan?

It is a ream of papers that are strategically documented to outline the tasks and timeline (start date and end date), launch plans, configurations, requirements, installation procedure, database and training standards of a software project.

What Questions Does A Software Development Plan Answer?

• The aim of the software project
• Main tasks
• Resources that it requires
• Project features, modules, functionality
• Responsibilities of each team member
• The quality measures and metrics

The Functionality of Software Development Planning Document

A software development plan should contain steps that would not let a project fail. It includes Software Requirement Specification (SRS), and Software Document Specification (SDS), It paves the way for the software development team to practice what they are good at. It also features a turnaround (Plan B), just in case Plan A does not work as expected. Once a project plan is approved by the project manager, project sponsor or the functional managers who provide the resources for the project, it always provides relevant results if done correctly.

Software Developers refrain from dragging it out, driving up the cost, and getting frustrated while on the project. The project plan always documents the output of the project. It bridges the gap between expected outcomes and offerings. A project plan should document the outputs like:

• Who is responsible for releasing the software?
• What is the revision management procedure?
• What are the license requirements for each output?

Steps to Create a Software Development Plan

• Analyze and Plan – Consider – How does this project fulfill the company’s mission and goals? Does the company have the human and other resources to achieve project success? How does this project align with the deadline of other projects and goals? How much will it cost?
• Define the project objective – clarify your intentions
• Determine your needs based on the development team’s skills and experience
• Resources and Requirements – Consider resources, budget, and time. Check the availability of resources, and the possibility to deliver on time and within budget.
• Constraints and Risks – Potential issues inbuilt in project development support from management, appropriate budget and schedule, and availability of skilled developers. Mapping the Business Processes with design specifications, sequence diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, flow charts, and Gantt Charts helps to define the process, and estimate risk.
• Plan the costs – Prepare for investing in software, hardware, developer salaries, project insurance, taxes to the government, and miscellaneous expenses.
• Create Timeline – Learn about your client’s requirements, never two-time their availability and resources, and stay transparent. It includes: Alpha Release -> Beta Release -> Marketing Campaign -> Number of Subscribers/Followers -> Investment Rounds (If applicable) -> Launch.
• Build a software team where team members have confidence in achieving common goals. A collective effort, individual confidence, self-organization, and cross-functionality bring a certain synergy to team structure and empower them at the crucial time of project delivery.
• Progress and Quality – It is the last and final step when the project is fully set up and ready to go. The project development concludes with quality assurance testing, and project deployment on Play Store/App Store, and all this is made possible with a project manager, software development team, recruitment assistance, and quality testing, to fast-track the project and ensure its success.
• Sprint Meetings – To define specific tasks, continuously revise, and modify to remove problems and enhance user experience. If any disputes arise during development, or while integrating with legacy versions of software, check back with previous project plan document versions and keep track of upcoming changes.

Benefits of Project Planning Document

It gives a clear picture of what everyone on board is going to do, what will every process cost, the overall cost of the project, and a common ground to understand the technical and non-technical requirements of the project, clear workflow and communication channels amongst stakeholders, clear roles and responsibilities for everyone on the team, status of stages marked as “done”, an initial agreement on how work would be handled after deployment (inclusive of bug fixing, new features, and updates).

Conclusive:

If you plan to fail, you fail to plan. Project Planning is that much essential for a Custom Software Development Project. Be additionally aware of a non-technical client, who finds it hard to explain why some things do not go as planned. They may also find it difficult to understand why a project cannot be delivered on time, on budget, despite the best possible efforts. The absence of a software requirement specification (SRS) and software design specification (SDS) might lead to a total failure of your project. It is imperative for custom software development companies to reduce project cycle time, increase predictability, minimize frustration among developers and deliver the project faster. Stay with ADA for more relevant articles!