Skip to content

The Basics of Software Project Planning

Presented By: Oscar Hermoso, Cloud Automation + DevOps Lead @ RAC

Why are we planning at all?

  • Helps break down a large project into manageable pieces
  • Helps prioritise important features (and deprioritise unnecessary ones)
  • Enables your team to complete work in parallel

Approach

Top-down approach:

  1. Goals
  2. Personas
  3. User journey
  4. Writing tickets
  5. Features
  6. Sub-tasks
  7. Bugs

Not strictly linear.

Goals

What are you trying to achieve?

  • Portfolio projects: want to showcase skills (needs to look good)
  • Solving a problem: want to help users in some way

What is out of scope?

(Hint: For an MVP, don't worry about cybersecurity, performance, accessibility, etc.)

Personas

Who are you building this for?

Common personas:

  • Users
  • Client (if applicable)
  • Developers (you and your team)

User Journey

Once you've identified personas, features naturally take a user story format:

"As a [persona], I want [feature], so that [benefit]."

You should do some research here - look at similar applications.

Good to do some light wireframing here - sketch out the pages of your application.

Writing Tickets

Recommend breaking down work into vertical slices (as explained below).

Alternatively, can break down tasks into horizontal layers first (frontend/backend/database), but this can lead to bottlenecks.

Features

Normally 1 user story per feature ticket, but may occasionally have a few user stories per feature.

Define "Acceptance Criteria" for each ticket. Example format:

  • MUST be able to [action]
  • MUST NOT be able to [action]
  • SHOULD have tests

Sub-tasks

  • UX/UI Design (Figma, etc)
  • Frontend Implementation
  • Backend APIs
  • Database Modelling
  • Deployment

Bugs

Take the format:

Steps to reproduce: 1. [Step one] 2. [Step two] ...

Expected result: [What you expected to happen]

Actual result: [What actually happened]

Extra info: [Browser, error logs, etc]

Some parting advice

  • Everything that I've said is advice, not rules
  • Revisit your goals often
  • Done is better than perfect
  • AI is a trap for defining goals & requirements