9-Step Guide: How to

Plan Effective Software

Development Projects
Software development is an extremely complex process. And way too

often with tech industries today, the work is needed… yesterday.

It’s something that happens whether you build software for clients

around the world or develop your own software products.

When the client is non-technical, you may find it hard to explain why

things don’t go as planned, or motivate why you need more

resources. And the client may get confused as to why a project can’t

be delivered on time and on budget, despite your developers’ best

efforts.

When you work on your own products, you may find it imperative to

reduce cycle time, increase predictability and minimize frustrations

among your developers to deliver projects faster.

That’s why planning is so vital (otherwise, it’ll look like this project

timeline…).

Because no matter how simple or complex the project is, you need

an effective project plan. It’s the solution for clear structure,

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documentation, and procedures to complete tasks efficiently, deliver

quality software, and meet realistic deadlines.

But how do you plan effective software development projects

nowadays?

How can you deliver better software, faster? Here’s your complete

guide on planning in 2021, with the help of development analytics.

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What is Software
Development Planning?
A software development plan refers to the process of organized

management for a project. It describes the activities and the

resources needed to complete it successfully.

Software development planning encompasses the timeline of a

development project. The plan describes all the phases of the

process – analysis and planning, ideation, design and development,

deployment, production and launch, and maintenance.

Knowing how to plan effective software development projects means

to document and cover everything from the concept, project

description and requirements, to a clear schedule of the timeline,

project monitoring, desired deliverables and potential revisions,

assessment of costs and resources, risk management and anything

in between.

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That is why the quality of the project largely depends on how well the

software project plan is built. It also allows for the optimal allocation

of resources exactly where they’re needed. Without planning, you’d

risk having too many hurdles to tackle during the process, which

would lead to delays, additional costs, customer dissatisfaction, low

morale and low team productivity.

As a result, the effective planning of software development projects

is essential to everyone – product owners, stakeholders, managers,

development teams.

The planning is ideally done by a project manager together with the

responsible team(s), in sync with the stakeholders and other

departments that have a role in the project’s success – such as

testing or QA teams, or marketing specialists.

The benefits of modern software projects planning are huge: not only

you’d have a clear process in place for everyone, but you’d also

develop more time- and cost-efficient, reliable software in a much

less stressful way, for both the provider and the client teams.

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Among other benefits of planning and following the software

development life cycle:

● Everyone “speaks” and understands the same language

● It sets clear workflows and communication channels between the parts
involved
● It sets clear roles and responsibilities for everyone on the team
● Everyone understands the status and the definition of “done” for each
step
● It sets an initial agreement on how work would be handled
post-production (bug fixing, new features, updates)

Setting processes to deliver digital projects started a while ago. In the

nineties, there was the Waterfall model, with long deadlines and

Gantt charts. We got Agile in the 2000s, with sprints and manual

reports.

Now, you have the Agile data-driven method that measures team

performance automatically and gives you real-time data on the

development work, to make more data-driven decisions.

It’s exactly what Waydev, the #1 development analytics platform,

helps you with.

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Waydev gives you practical and objective insights on engineering

work, helping you visualize how many resources are spent on

unplanned work, bug fixing and other initiatives. You can better

understand the financial impact and project costs and you’ll be able

to use custom, automatic reports to answer complex questions

about what’s happening in the development process.

Try Waydev with your team for free.

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What Are the Goals of
Planning a Software Project?
We can say that the main goal of planning is organizing the process

to make sure client and user requirements are met, and preventing

issues and miscommunication. How it’s done will greatly influence

the success or the failure of the project.

If we’re to dive a bit deeper into the purposes of planning a software

development project, it would be about having a clear overview over:

● The functional purpose of the software project

● The tasks and subtasks to complete each functional requirement
● The list of priorities regarding the features development
● The people involved and their clear roles and responsibilities
● Resources and realistic estimates
● The performance and process metrics that will measure efficiency and
quality of work.

Among the most important goals and requirements needed for

effective planning are:

● Having a clear and concise understanding of the goals and specs

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 ● Finding time and cost efficient solutions to completing the project
● Having a complete documentation of the project roadmap
● Adherence to quality development standards,
● Delivering reliable, high-quality products to end users
● Ensuring the flexibility needed to accommodate changes and iterations
without affecting the process.

As you can see, there are both project goals and business goals to

achieve.

Having a well-thought-out development plan also helps when

there’s a problem or a roadblock. By following the process, it’s easier

to spot and clear them without affecting the timeline.

Check out how Waydev works: our development analytics platform

analyzes your codebase, PRs, tickets, and CI/CD activities, to help you

bring out the best in your engineering teams’ work.

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What is Included in a Software
Development Plan?
Because software development is a complex technical process that

requires a lot of steps, having a project plan is extremely helpful to

visualize and follow each step of its development, according to a

timeline for the team’s work.

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Fortunately, there are many tools – such as development and project

analytics, as well as project management apps – to choose from.

This choice usually depends on the size of the engineering team and

the complexity of the software project.

What is generally included in a software development plan are the

following stages:

● Planning: when you define the project and its objectives;

● Scoping: when you analyze and set:
○ tasks and subtasks as specific as possible
○ Realistic time and cost estimates together with the developers –
but account for unexpected delays: holidays, sick days, meetings
○ Milestones and their indicative dates (to know how the project is
going)
● Implementing: when you develop and deploy the software.

Since data is your best friend in software development, it’s always a

great idea to use historical data and check your past processes –

with Waydev’s Project Timeline, it’s possible. See whether you were

inclined to overscore or underscore when planning a software

project (although it’s usually the latter).

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Now, let’s dive into what matters most – learn how to plan effective

software development projects, by making sure you have these

important steps (or phases) on your checklist.

9-Step Planning Guide for

Software Development
Projects

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As a tech lead or software engineering manager, you’re already

familiar with all these different stages of the software development

life cycle. That’s pretty much the same steps as those for any

software product, no matter the chosen process.

After all, you’re responsible for your team’s performance, the quality

and efficiency of the delivered software, and the communication

with stakeholders and alignment of engineering goals with business

initiatives.

So, what are the steps to start a software project? The first one –

planning everything.

1. Project Analysis
This is the first step of the scoping stage of a software project

requested by a customer. It has a lot to do with the feasibility of the

project.

This analysis part is to make sure you’re starting on the right foot, and

it means looking into:

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 ● A deeper understanding of the purpose of the project (concept and
goals)
● Also, a deeper understanding the needs of the project
● The project specifications.

Most of the time, it takes place at the same time as the requirements

and the main planning phase, since they’re all connected.

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2. Requirements
As you move on to the third step in planning and continue to

complete the scope of the project, your development team and you

start to document the technical requirements needed to successfully

deliver the software product.

In this stage, your tasks are to:

● Decide on the team responsible for the development

● Decide on the requirements
● Decide on the milestones that would work as checkpoints for testing
and feedback rounds (they answer to: “how’s the project going?”)

Together with your team, you’ll answer specific questions about the

technical aspects of the project, such as: what issue does the project

solve? Who’s the end-user? What sort of data is needed? Does it

need certain integrations? How is security tackled?

By answering these questions, you will be able to describe and

document the technical specifications and requirements, methods

of testing, technology stacks, software and hardware, as well as the

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type of methodology (you might start sprint planning, if you’re using

Agile).

Part of this planning stage is also the risk assessment, making sure

that you’re also understanding the constraints or risks the project

might have.

3. Planning
Planning is the most meticulous and critical part of the project. It’s

also part of the project scope that allows everyone a clear

understanding of the timeline from ideation to deployment.

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 ● A clear overview over the timeline ensures a better organization and
synchronization of everyone involved.
● By breaking down work into tasks, subtasks and steps you will take and
looking at the resources needed, you can provide a clearer estimate of
the time and budget.
● You can use a Gantt chart, a list or, better yet, a software tool to
visualize this timeline plan and track it smoothly.

If there’s an issue, you can pinpoint and solve it more easily than

having no planning at all.

At the same time, this step determines the quality of your

management – which, in turn, will determine the success of the

project. The more detailed and well-thought the planning is, the

easier it becomes to follow the schedule and prevent too many

issues along the process.

As a result, the planning phase is all about researching, deciding and

documenting all the aspects: goals, deliverables, tasks, costs,

deadlines.

But don’t forget to set meaningful engineering KPIs and metrics in

place to quantify your projects’ success for the concrete targets you

set.

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To give you a more specific structure, now’s the time when you’d

have to work on:

● An approximate timeline and main stages of the development

● Tasks and subtasks for each individual who works on the project
● Ways of communicating with the team, the client, stakeholders
● Time and cost estimates (more accurate when the requirements are
set and analyzed)
● Release dates and types of releases
● Documentation of everything (even though you’ll make iterations, keep
this intact).

An ideal scenario is to have the software development team working

together with the marketing and the testing team to align business

and development goals – but that’s not a rule. If they’re part of an

external team, testers, for example, can cover their part at a later

stage.

The planning stage also describes the specific stages of the project

development, work needed in each stage, and cost estimation.

The timeline should be frequently revisited. Nothing is set in stone

when it comes to software development, since it’s always a complex

process to handle, so adaptability is key.

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Waydev is trusted by over 1,000 engineering leaders worldwide.

Discover how our complete Git Analytics tool features can also help

you to increase velocity and reduce cycle time.

4. Design & Prototyping

The next part of an effective software project plan is conceptual

designing. This has nothing to do with the aesthetics, but with the

project architecture and functionality.

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As a result, it’s done by software architects and engineers to make

sure the flow, structure and the functionality meet the project

requirements. It can include:

● The whole structure and its capabilities

● The functionality of the software solution
● Hardware and software components, if needed
● Software tools for future development
● Processes that meet the business needs and goals.

In this stage of the software development life cycle, it’s expected to

create either simple, easy to understand wireframes that show the

functions and interactions of the product – or prototyping, if you

need feedback from users on the proposed features.

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5. Measuring and Tracking Progress
Before moving on, we have to take a look at this step of the planning

process checklist.

You need to set software metrics to track and measure performance

and code quality. Setting these metrics should take place at the

beginning of the project development, to secure a clear and steady

workflow with as few roadblocks as possible

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Without these measurements to collect and provide valuable data,

you cannot manage the project effectively.

Project analytics, or development analytics, are essential tools that

help you accurately spot and then clear out potential or existing

obstacles during the software development life cycle.

As you track and measure these software metrics, it becomes easier

to see work trends, as well as the level of code quality and

deployment readiness, to name a few. Learn what metrics to track

here: Software Metrics Leaders Can Measure to Track the

Development Process.

Our tool provides you with all the relevant developer metrics you

need to track and measure work from start to finish – in real-time.

You have, for example, the Project Timeline report that shows you the

most actionable metrics in code-based activity. It helps you see

what your team is working on over a sprint or a custom time frame.

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Depending on the project requirements, evaluating them will lead

you to build better software faster, to ask for additional resources, or

adjust the delivery dates based on objective data.

You get a crystal-clear overview of the Code Review Workflow

metrics to learn what’s going on in the review process to optimize

engineer collaboration.

And you also get incredible insights with automated executive

reports on Resource Planning and Project Costs to understand how

resources are spent and to help teams ship on schedule.

Working remotely? Request a demo and get the Agile data-driven

approach to software development no matter where your teams are.

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6. Development & Coding
Once the design step is complete, it’s time to move to implementing

them through coding. So this next one in planning effective software

development projects is one of the hardest, most complex and

time-consuming one: the software development stage.

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The software development team is now starting to build the solution

according to the scope of the project, requirements and proposed

functionalities previously agreed on. Depending on the size of the

project, it can be a simple and quick process, or a more complex one

that requires various integrations and functionalities.

Either way, the role of the planning work is to make sure you keep

potential risks at a minimum and build a stable, clean and effective

software product.

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7. Testing & Quality Control
Still, the delivery of reliable software is not done without quality

testing. You’ll have to check:

● Compliance with project requirements

● Meeting the budget and time estimates
● Code quality and other relevant software metrics.

That is why this step of the planning process requires you to have

these aspects set in place before starting the actual work.

Oftentimes, development and testing are conducted simultaneously

to make sure each software feature your team is developing is

bug-free and ready to go. However, once the software solution is

completely developed, it still needs a full round of testing to make

sure the final product is working as it should and it’s bug-free and

useful to end-users.

This is why we have this step separate – it’s also a stage that takes

more time to finish.

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The testing and quality assurance phase can also be covered by an

external team. If that’s the case, they can provide a separate plan for

this stage.

8. Deployment to Production
This is the (almost) final stage of every software project development

process: deploying the code into production. It’s the moment when

all the hard work your developers put in is finally launched live to

end-users.

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Deploying is not necessarily taking place at the same time as the

production stage. Software projects are, again, pretty complex. So

you might perform several deployments during the development

and testing stages, before having the final deployment to production.

Sometimes, the process looks like this during the development,

testing and production stages:

● Your team builds, deploys and tests code until it is ready for release;
● That code becomes a release candidate;
● Your team deploys the release candidate for pre-release testing;
● Work on release candidates until one is stable enough as the final one;
● Name that stable release candidate as the release version
● Deploy the release version to production.

9. Support & Maintenance

Even though the planned development work is done, that doesn’t

mean the work on the software is also done. After launching it live,

the software usually goes through other stages of its development.

The post-production stage refers to the support and maintenance of

the live software. Almost all digital projects need some sort of basic

maintenance or maybe more advanced updates – at some point or

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on a regular basis, hence the name of software development life

cycle.

Just like customer needs are always evolving, so do the products and

services they use.

The goal of this stage is to ensure the scalability and improvement of

the initial software to better serve its users through:

● Basic maintenance of the existing software

● Bug fixing – there will always be bugs to fix, once the people use the live
software;
● New (or improved) features and functionalities to be added, depending
on the user feedback

One important thing to remember is that the client should have

everything about the project available to them. In your planning

process, make sure that:

● The client can have technical assistance post-deployment (usually

agreed initially);
● You have complete documentation of the software project from
ideation to production;
● There is a documented plan on maintenance, support and
documentation practices;

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 ● There’s a clear procedure when it comes to technical debt and code
quality control (keeping developers accountable). Find out more here
about measuring developer productivity with the right performance
metrics.

Make sure you have all this data written in the project timeline and

list of activities (tasks and subtasks) so that you’ll know how to

prioritize them accordingly.

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Wrapping up: How Can You
Improve the Success of a
Software Development
Project?
Use the full potential of effective project planning to avoid (or

minimize) these risks:

● Incomplete or inadequate specs

● Incomplete documentation
● Communication gaps between the client, the team, and stakeholders
● Scope creep (because of lack of an Agile data-driven methodology)
● Delivery delays

Regular progress checks are necessary at every stage. Answer these

questions:

● Did we achieve the milestones and targets?

● Are we within the agreed timeframe and budget?
● Are the resources being used optimally?

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But all the steps in our guide will ensure you’re planning successful

software projects, no matter the size or complexity of the requested

solution.

Fortunately, today you have development analytics at your fingertips

– not just to plan and manage more effectively, but to boost team

performance and morale, the client’s satisfaction with the results

and, of course, the alignment with your own organization’s goals as

well.

That being said, we hope you now have a better understanding of

how to plan effective projects with the help of this guide and a

data-driven approach.

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About Us

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measuring the performance of their engineering teams. We strive to

help the technology industry move towards a data-driven agile

development methodology and make decisions supported by data.

We are trusted by Fortune 500 companies, such as Blue Cross Blue

Shield, TATA, and Carrier, and we are also loved by startups (#1

Product on Product Hunt).

Waydev is the G2 Market Leader in Winter and Spring 2022

Visit waydev.co to learn more

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