{"id":5902,"date":"2021-09-24T12:39:54","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T12:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kovair.com\/blog\/?p=5902"},"modified":"2025-11-10T06:04:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T06:04:14","slug":"how-to-plan-for-an-application-development-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kovair.com\/blogs\/how-to-plan-for-an-application-development-project\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Plan for an Application Development Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Application<\/p>\n

Entrepreneurs, designers, and developers all share the same exciting energy at the start of a software development project. They\u2019ve been briefed and think the idea is excellent. They want to get stuck in and start building this thing! The details will probably sort themselves out along the way, right?<\/p>\n

Wrong. Planning the project is arguably the most important and hardest to execute. This step is so difficult because the project team doesn\u2019t have all the information yet. There are ways around this, and in this short guide, we\u2019ll detail a no-fluff breakdown of how to plan for an application development project.<\/p>\n

Steps to plan application development project<\/h2>\n

These are the general steps to planning your application development project. You can apply these steps with the same success to a complex website development project.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Define your goal<\/li>\n
  2. Build your requirements<\/li>\n
  3. Create the project plan<\/li>\n
  4. Set up your tools and processes<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    1.\u00a0\u00a0 Define your goal<\/h3>\n

    Building an application isn\u2019t a goal. It\u2019s a vehicle that will enable you and your team to achieve a bigger purpose.\u00a0Making money isn\u2019t a great goal either. You could argue this point, but money-making is more of an outcome of the application achieving its goal.<\/p>\n

    A better goal is something like fixing a problem that you\u2019ve noticed a lot of people have. For example, a lot of people struggle with procrastination. Your application\u2019s goal could be to create an application that prevents procrastination on the internet.<\/p>\n

    If you\u2019re not familiar with the theory behind goals, a million articles are written around creating practical goals. They all mention the SMART principle: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.<\/p>\n

    [the_ad id=”2867″]<\/p>\n

    Keeping this in mind, we would better present our example goal like this:\u00a0Our application\u2019s goal is to reduce the number of times users procrastinate on the internet by 50% after a single session of using the application. This is a specific goal that we can measure through user surveys; it\u2019s not so optimistic that it\u2019s unattainable. It is relevant to most internet users and bound by the number of times the user interacts with the application.<\/p>\n

    2. Build your requirements<\/h3>\n

    Defining requirements<\/a> is critical to ensuring your designers and developers end up building the right thing. To use a house-building analogy, without a good blueprint, there\u2019s a chance the single-story home could end up as a double-story duplex.<\/p>\n

    Writing requirements in a way that\u2019s easy for developers to read and understand can be difficult. The goal is to be succinct while providing enough detail that the requirement can only be interpreted the intended way.<\/p>\n

    Epics and user stories can help with this approach. Epics are big groups of requirements that are broken down into small functional requirements called user stories. Stories are written from a user\u2019s perspective and are technology agnostic, meaning they shouldn\u2019t mention any technology that needs to be used to achieve the requirement.<\/p>\n

    A typical user story looks like this:\u00a0\u201cAs a logged-in user, I want to be able to turn on the application and have it prevent me from accessing cute dog pictures, so I can focus on doing my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Breaking your requirements down to this level of granularity and using language that is easy to understand goes a long way to having your team move in the same direction once the project commences.<\/p>\n

    3. Create the project plan<\/h3>\n

    There are plenty of super detailed, content-heavy project plans out there you could copy. We wouldn\u2019t recommend doing that.\u00a0Simply filling in the blanks of a project plan template is the wrong way to approach this step. The idea behind creating your project plan is to think backward from achieving your goal. As best you can, document every single activity and detail that will be required to get you from point A to point B.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s a high-level breakdown with the procrastination application example we listed earlier:<\/p>\n