Guide to Frame Effective Software Development Project Plans

Most software development projects start with high expectations but eventually, things go awry when production fails to get off the ground. While this is an evitable thing, you can’t prevent a project from going off the rails, all you can do is to increase the chances of success by sticking to a powerful software development project plan.

Here in this article, we will discuss why having a software development plan is important and see what a step-by-step guide to creating one looks like!

What’s A Software Development Plan?

Software development project plans are designed to optimize development and provide everyone including the product owners, stakeholders, and developers a deeper understanding of what’s expected and what could be done to attain the desired results. The goal of these software development plans is to provide better knowledge on the following questions –

• What would be the order of the development? – The Phases
• Who will be involved in the project? – The Resources
• How will the responsibility be divided among different teams? – Task Allocation
• Which functionality is chosen to ensure seamless development? – The Technology
• What kind of dependencies are there among teams and whom to communicate? – Part of Communication
• Which metrics and factors will define the efficiency of the project? – The Quality

If during the execution of the software development plan, the team faces any confusion or bumps into a dead end, they can always come back to the development plan and find the solution to their concerns. This also helps in preventing miscommunication and organizing the process in a very effective manner.

Why Is It Important to Create A Software Development Plan?

Here are some of the top reasons you need to have a plan in place –

1. To Identify Potential Hurdles

DevOps leaders often fail to accomplish their project and achieve desired results because of not considering the required resources. Hence, they run out of time, budget, and hidden complexities and thus lead to delayed deadlines and ultimately project failure.

Connectivity and network constraints can also pose unique development challenges when ignored at the beginning. Therefore, getting a software development project plan ready ahead of time helps in removing potential barriers and making accommodations to avoid them.

2. To Communicate Better

Poor communication between project participants often leads to project failure. That’s because, everyone in the team, be they managers, developers, designers, or security teams, all have differing views on how software should operate. Hence, all them need to have a meeting to discuss what’s the best way to achieve the desired results.

By forming a solid software development plan and going over details as a group early on, project failure could be prevented.

3. To Set Expectations

The project expectations should be highlighted at the very beginning of a software development project.

For the best results, all parties must come together and go over the general direction of a project to determine what’s possible and what to avoid.

4. To Highlight Security & Privacy Issues

Security and privacy requirements are inevitable and they can transform drastically over time.

On the security side, new threats and vulnerabilities can arise overnight! So, the team must always be prepared to fix them. At the same time, the watchdog groups are increasingly cracking down on privacy violations and penalizing companies that fail to disclose data usage or provide consent. It’s important to focus on this part as well.

5. To Improvise the Process

Continuous improvement is the top-most need for any software company. To remain competitive, software development teams need to constantly focus on making the development faster, more efficient, and more affordable.

In light of this, forming a preliminary software development project plan can help your team share feedback and improve output and delivery.

How to Create Effective & Result-Driven Software Development Project Plans?

To write a powerful software development plan, you need to get everything related to the project on the same page. Organize a meeting to connect with your team and discuss the key points and plan’s structure.
Once the whole team discusses the plan’s key components, ask your project manager to take over the responsibility and ensure the successful completion of the plan.

The Software Development Plans Require Good Structures

The first and the most important step in writing a software development plan is to put together all key components and prepare a checklist about their contents with a sample of the software development project plans. Check out the step-by-step guide to turning your software development plan into a successful strategy.

Step 1 – Introduction

Understand the purpose of the software development project. Your goal is to define which type of development is needed, what would be the overall concept, and what should be your team’s main expectations.

Define these pointers to get started!

• The project description highlights the goals of the development.
• The project expectations in terms of functionality and features.
• Abbreviations should be there in your software development project plan to describe all the acronyms, special symbols, and certain forms.

Step 2 – Project Organization

For better management, create a table with all project participants and describe their functions in detail. Here is the list of main teams that would be working on the project –

• Testing/QA
• Deployment
• Marketing

The project organization plan enables teams to increase transparency. All participants must be aware of their responsibilities and tasks in a documented form.

Step 3 – Management

Define the stages of the software development project, evaluate the workload, and provide estimations for budget and time.

• Estimation – Predicted turnaround time and cost of the project with the team’s reasoning and circumstances for re-estimation.
• Project Plan – State an approximate schedule, the key stages that’d be involved in the project, and available resources.
• Development Phases – A project plan does not only offer a description of the development process but more details to describe each phase individually.
• Objectives – Create a list of objectives for every specific stage of the product development.
• Release Plans – An estimation of the expected release date and specify its status.
• Resourcing – For each stage, there should be individual resourcing sections with available and unavailable skills, required hardware, and software.

Step 4 – Project Control

This section sums up the actions and approaches that the team and the stakeholders will take to examine the quality of the project. Here’s a checklist for planning project monitoring

• Compliance with requirements
• Budget and schedule
• Quality assurance
• Risk prevention
• Improvement plan

Step 5 – Maintenance and Support

After the development process is completed, it’s important to have proper cooperation between developers and the product owner as technical assistance will likely be required throughout the software development life cycle of the product.

Having a detailed software development plan for maintenance, support, and documentation practices will help avoid vendor lock-in.

Conclusion

The software development plans are just as impactful as the development itself. They form a foundation to lead to success and offer the concerned teams relevant opportunities to put their best efforts and innovative ideas to impress the clients and bring out the desired results.

It’s a long-term investment, it will be one of your main documents for years. You can even reuse approaches for different projects and products.

At Cloudester, we take software planning very seriously. Our goal remains to help our clients with objective project estimates, and risk evaluation, cooperate with potential users, and define tangible metrics to ensure success. Our business analysts and project managers would be happy to share their insights, let’s connect with us to discuss further.