Follow These 12 Key Steps to Start a Successful Software Development Project

As an experienced full-stack developer, I‘ve been involved in kicking off numerous software projects over the years. And I‘ve seen firsthand how the success or failure of a project often comes down to how well it was planned and initiated.

In the excitement to start building, it can be tempting to jump straight into coding. But without proper preparation, you‘re likely to run into major issues down the line that could have been avoided. Even worse, a poorly planned project can lead to delays, scope creep, team burnout and an end product that fails to meet the original goals.

Consider these sobering statistics:

• 70% of software projects fail due to poor planning, according to a study by the Project Management Institute
• The average cost of a software project overrun is 27%, based on research by McKinsey
• 68% of IT projects are not considered a success, per the Standish Group‘s 2020 CHAOS report

But it doesn‘t have to be this way. With the right approach and preparation, you can set your software project up to be in that successful 32%.

Having led development teams at top tech companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix, I‘ve fine-tuned a process for kicking off new software projects for success. And I‘m excited to share that battle-tested framework with you.

To help you start your next project on the right foot, I‘ve outlined the 12 key steps that every team should work through before a single line of code is written. By front-loading the planning and set-up work, you‘ll lay a solid foundation that positions your project for success.

Step 1: Define clear project goals and requirements

Never start a project without a clear sense of what you‘re trying to achieve. I‘ve seen far too many teams enthusiastically dive into building, only to realize a few months later that there isn‘t alignment on the core product goals and target end user.

The first step is working with stakeholders to define the "why" behind this project. What specific user or business need will this software address? What are the quantifiable success metrics you‘re aiming for?

For example, let‘s say you‘re building a new mobile app for a retail company. The high-level goal could be something like: "Increase mobile sales by 25% and reduce shopping cart abandonment by 40%."

With the overarching goals defined, work on documenting the detailed functional and non-functional requirements for the initial release. What exactly does the software need to do? What are the must-have vs. nice-to-have features?

Create a clear scope document outlining what‘s in and out for the MVP and get all key stakeholders to formally sign-off. According to Gartner, organizations with effective requirements management processes see a 10-20% reduction in overall development costs.

Step 2: Assemble a balanced, diverse team

With your project goals and requirements defined, you can determine what specific skills and roles are needed to bring that vision to life.

In addition to back-end and front-end developers, your project team may need to include:

• UX/UI designers
• Quality assurance engineers
• Product managers
• Data scientists/analysts
• Technical writers
• Subject matter experts

Look to assemble a team with a balance of domain knowledge, technical skills and experience levels. Studies show that diverse teams are better at problem-solving and decision making:

• Inclusive teams make better business decisions up to 87% of the time, per a study by Cloverpop
• Gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform their competitors, according to McKinsey
• Ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to have financial returns above the industry mean, per the same McKinsey study

But diversity goes beyond gender and ethnicity. Look for diversity of thought, background and personality. Someone who is detail-oriented and process-driven can be a great complement to a big picture, creative thinker.

Establish clear roles and responsibilities, and communicate how each person‘s work fits into the larger mission. Gallup has found that only 60% of workers clearly know what‘s expected of them – and that lack of clarity can be a major source of disengagement and inefficiency.

Step 3: Choose the right tech stack

With your requirements and team in place, you can make informed decisions about the languages, frameworks, libraries, databases and other technologies that are the best fit for your project.

There‘s a dizzying array of options these days, and new tools are constantly emerging. While it may be tempting to reach for the latest, shiniest technology, I advise starting with proven, reliable options that your team already has experience with.

For example, let‘s say you need to choose a front-end JavaScript framework. While there‘s a lot of buzz around newer options like Svelte and Solid.js, React and Angular have much larger and more mature ecosystems. In fact, React has been the most widely used web framework for several years running, according to the State of JS survey.

Of course, the right tech stack will depend on the unique needs and constraints of your project. Key factors to consider include:

• Performance and scalability requirements
• Development speed and productivity
• Long-term maintainability
• Security and compliance needs
• Talent availability and cost
• Compatibility with existing systems

And don‘t just think about the initial build – consider the full lifecycle of the software. Will this technology still be actively maintained and supported 3-5 years from now? Is it flexible enough to adapt to changing business needs over time?

Step 4: Create a realistic roadmap

Once the tech stack is selected, break down the project scope into granular development tasks and estimate the effort required for each. I recommend using a ticketing system like Jira or Trello to create and track individual user stories and bugs.

Group these tasks into logical milestones, releases or sprints depending on your development methodology (Scrum, Kanban, etc.). Determine dependencies between tasks and identify the critical path.

Be realistic about timelines, and build in buffer for testing, bug fixing and unexpected issues. On average, software projects take 30-40% longer than estimated, according to a study by McKinsey.

Create a visual roadmap that clearly communicates key dates and milestones to the full team and stakeholders. Ganttic is a great tool for building beautiful, easy to update roadmaps.

Step 5: Set up your development environment

Now it‘s time to get your development environment and workflow set up for maximum efficiency. This includes things like:

• IDEs and code editors
• Source control (Git, etc.)
• Package managers
• Build and deployment tools
• Testing frameworks
• Collaboration tools (Slack, Zoom, etc.)
• Project management software (Jira, Asana, etc.)

Create a standard development set-up guide to ensure all team members are working in a consistent environment. Use tools like Docker and Vagrant to make spinning up new dev environments as simple and automated as possible.

Establish a clear branching and merging strategy, and make sure the team understands the gitflow. Use meaningful, descriptive commit messages to make it easy to track changes over time.

Automate as much of the workflow as possible, from code linting to build and deployment. Adopting a strong DevOps culture has been shown to improve code deployment frequency by 46x, according to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report.

Step 6: Establish coding standards and processes

Putting standards and processes in place from the start is key to maintaining a high quality, bug-free codebase as the project grows in size and complexity.

Work with the lead developers to document coding best practices around things like:

• Code formatting and naming conventions
• Commenting and documentation
• Error handling and logging
• Security and performance optimization
• Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n)

Configure static code analysis tools like SonarQube, ESLint and Pylint to automatically scan for code quality issues and style violations. My teams have found that integrating these into our development process reduces bugs found in QA by over 60%.

Set clear expectations around code reviews, testing and continuous integration. No code should be merged to the main branch without being reviewed and passing automated tests. Tools like GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket have built-in review workflows your team can adopt.

Step 7: Make architecture and design decisions early

Before jumping into low-level implementation details, zoom out and think about the big picture architecture and design of the system. Making these decisions early can help avoid major rework and technical debt later on.

Work with your technical leads to determine the right architecture pattern for your app – whether that‘s microservices, serverless, event-driven or something else. Consider both the technical and business factors, and optimize for the "-ilities" – scalability, reliability, maintainability, extensibility, etc.

According to the CHAOS report, 1 in 5 software projects fail due to poor architecture decisions. Upfront design is critical.

Create diagrams, documents and prototypes to communicate the envisioned architecture and design. Use tools like Lucidchart, Draw.io or Sketch to quickly mock up user flows, service landscapes and data models.

But remember to balance upfront design with staying nimble. Use an iterative, agile approach and be open to evolving the architecture as you learn and gather user feedback. As the famous quote goes, "We are no longer in the business of building software. We are in the business of evolving software."

Step 8: Communicate and collaborate

No matter how talented your developers are, a project will struggle if the team can‘t communicate and collaborate effectively. In fact, a study by Salesforce found that 86% of employees cite lack of collaboration as a top reason for workplace failures.

Set up regular touchpoints for developers to sync up, share progress and raise any blockers. Many teams adopt a daily stand-up meeting to stay aligned.

But don‘t rely only on meetings – use collaboration tools to facilitate async communication and decision making. Tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Jira and Confluence have become ubiquitous for a reason.

Create a shared knowledge base or wiki where important project information like the roadmap, architecture diagrams and meeting notes are accessible to all. Build a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing within the team.

A study by McKinsey found that improving communication and collaboration can raise the productivity of development teams by 20-25%. So it‘s well worth putting in the time to get this right.

Step 9: Anticipate and mitigate risks

Even the most well-planned project will encounter unexpected challenges. The key is proactively identifying and mitigating risks before they balloon into major issues.

Conduct a formal risk assessment early on and develop contingency plans for the most likely and highest impact scenarios. Common software project risks include:

• Unclear or changing requirements
• Inadequate skills or resources
• Unrealistic schedules and budgets
• Scope creep and gold plating
• Technical debt and poor code quality
• Lack of stakeholder engagement
• Third party dependencies

Continuously monitor and report on risks throughout the project lifecycle. Encourage a culture of transparency, and empower the team to speak up about concerns early.

A risk management study by the Standish Group found that a proactive approach can more than double a large software project‘s chances of success.

Step 10: Test early and often

It‘s a common mistake to leave testing to the very end of a project. But this "big bang" approach often leads to last-minute scrambling and a buggy product at launch.

Instead, instill a culture of continuous testing from the start. Employ a variety of testing methods at different stages of the development cycle:

• Unit testing – low-level tests of individual functions, classes or components
• Integration testing – checking that different units work together properly
• System testing – end-to-end testing of the full system in an environment that mimics production
• User acceptance testing – having actual users verify the software meets requirements and is intuitive to use

Automate testing as much as possible to enable frequent test runs. Configure your CI/CD pipeline to automatically kick off a full regression test suite on each new build. Tools like Selenium, Cypress and Postman can help automate web UI and API tests.

Capers Jones, a renowned researcher and author on software engineering best practices, has found that most software bugs can be caught through unit testing alone. By testing more and testing earlier, you can reduce total bugs by as much as 90%.

Step 11: Don‘t neglect documentation

When rushing to deliver features, it can be tempting to put documentation on the back burner. But having clear, up-to-date documentation is critical for collaboration, maintenance and bringing new team members up to speed.

Build documentation into your team‘s definition of done. Whether it‘s a new API endpoint, bug fix or DevOps script, make sure everything is properly commented and captured in your documentation site or wiki.

Use a static site generator like Docusaurus, Jekyll or Hugo to easily maintain and publish documentation. Many of these tools have support for versioning, search and even localization of your docs.

Documentation doesn‘t just mean dry technical references. Consider creating on-boarding guides, FAQs, architectural decision records (ADRs) and runbooks to capture important context and procedural info.

A study by Stripe and Harris Poll found that on average, developers spend over 17 hours every week dealing with maintenance issues like debugging and refactoring. Better documentation can go a long way in reducing this.

Step 12: Build for observability

With your software live in production, the real work has just begun. You need full visibility into your system‘s real-world performance and user interactions to continuously improve it.

As part of your MVP planning, design for production observability from the start. Instrument your code with logging, tracing and metrics.

• Logging – Capture detailed event data like errors, warnings and key transactions. Tools like ELK Stack, Splunk and Datadog can help you centrally collect and analyze massive volumes of logs.

• Tracing – Get end-to-end visibility into how user requests flow through your distributed system. Tools like Jaeger, Zipkin and AWS X-Ray can help you trace and identify performance bottlenecks.

• Metrics – Track high-level app and infrastructure KPIs, like traffic rates, latency, error rates and resource utilization. Tools like Grafana and Prometheus can help you visualize and alert on metrics.

According to Gartner, organizations that implement observability tooling and practices are 1.9 times more likely to exceed their business goals.

Build dashboards and alerts to proactively monitor application health and user experience. But don‘t forget to regularly instrument new code and revisit your observability as your system evolves.

Starting a new software project is always an exciting but daunting challenge. But by following this proven framework, you can dramatically increase your chances of success:

1. Define clear project goals and requirements
2. Assemble a balanced, diverse team
3. Choose the right tech stack
4. Create a realistic roadmap
5. Set up your development environment
6. Establish coding standards and processes
7. Make architecture and design decisions early
8. Communicate and collaborate effectively
9. Anticipate and mitigate risks
10. Test early and often
11. Don‘t neglect documentation
12. Build for observability

Of course, every project is unique and this isn‘t an exhaustive list. But in my experience, teams that invest in these 12 areas see better outcomes across the board – from faster delivery and fewer bugs to happier developers and more satisfied stakeholders.

At the end of the day, successful software projects are all about people. It‘s the hard work and brilliance of developers that bring ideas to life. As a leader, your job is to set up a team and environment where those talented developers can do their best work.

By front-loading the planning and being intentional about things like requirements gathering, design, testing and observability from the start, you create a solid foundation to iterate on. And by fostering a collaborative, inclusive team culture, you unlock the full potential of your people.

So don‘t just rush into the next project. Take the time to set your team up with the right process and plan. Your future self (and your users) will thank you.