How I Plan My Software Projects

I love the feeling of starting a new project. You have so many ideas here and there and you can’t wait to start working on them. But if it isn’t done in an organized way, you end up losing motivation and sooner or later, you end your future startup.

Below are some things that have helped me over the years. Today, when I start a new project, here is what I do —

1. Brainstorm by setting up a call with the team members. Once everyone is convinced that we should do it, we kick off. The reason is simple. Your idea might be stupid! Only your brothers can call that out.
2. I decide on the appropriate tech stack to use for the project. This includes the backend, frontend, media servers, CDNs, deployments, etc. I am in love with the MERN stack.
3. I clone the appropriate boilerplate which has all the basic requirements of step 1. You can find more details here. This is also the part where you send out invites to collaborators.
4. The next step is to set up JIRA for planning the sprint cycles. I use the Kanban board which is good for iterative development.
5. In JIRA, I open Confluence and start writing my documentation. There are two main ones — the PRD (The specifications document) and the Engineering document (The crux of what we are going to build).