How to Organize Your Solo Dev Project Like a Pro

there is a lot more to software development than just writing code there's brainstorming there's planning there's testing there's design work normally an entire team shares this workload but what if you're working on a project by yourself how do you keep it all straight hi my name is Brena Davis and I've been working in the software development field for about 12 years so I've learned a thing or two about how to organize a software development project the nice thing is is even if you're working on a project alone you can still run it as if you're on a team I'm currently in the midst of a big development project where I'm taking the idea of a life Sim game and combining it with a real world task manager there's a lot for me to juggle with this project so I've been using the software development process that I've learned and during my time as a developer in the professional world to help me manage this project on the side this software development process is known as agile in particular I'm using the scrum framework which divides your work up into two week chunks or Sprints as they call them there are people out there that say you can't do scrum by yourself it's designed for teams well yes it is designed for teams but there's no reason why you can't borrow principles from it and utilize it as a solo Dev there are a few tools that I use in order to be able to manage this process for myself I always have a physical notebook ready for me to be able to jot down notes and ideas into I also o have a drawing app on my iPad called Concepts that I like to use to draw mind maps and notes because it has an infinite canvas that I can expand in infinitely and I I always have room for more notes I also use a not taking app called obsidian which is text based but it too has a feature that allows you to be able to create an infinite canvas with the notes that you take within the app I use these to organize my thoughts and to get ideas for what I want to implement into whatever project that I'm working on to manage the actual agile process I use an app called shortcut a couple other uh options that you could look at using that are inexpensive are Trello and notion they have the ability to have what's called a conon board which is columns uh showing the different statuses of what you're working on and you can create cards and put them in those columns and you move them through the columns to indicate what stage of the process that particular item is in I'm using shortcut because it more closely resembles what I'm used to in my professional job and it connects directly to GitHub which is where I'm storing all of the code that I'm writing for the project shortcut gives me a the the different views that I am used to to looking at I've got a view for my backlog a view for what iteration or or Sprints I'm on once again the way that scrum works is you create a backlog of issues things that you need to get done these are small preferably bite-sized chunks of the overall project that you're trying to complete you put all these issues into a backlog and then you have a meeting called a a refinement meeting where you go through the issues in the backlog you look at them and you fill out information about that issue you fill about the details and you estimate what effort you think that particular issue is going to take you put that in as a number and you gauge the effort based on other issues that are in your backlog so if this particular issue is a three in effort which is like kind of a middle middle effort it's not too easy it's not too hard but maybe this issue is in comparison to that other issue is a five because it's harder it takes more effort to get it done once again normally you would do this as a team you would get together and have a discussion fill out the details about the the story sometimes these tickets are called stories you fill out all the details together as a team and you estimate how hard you think it's going to or what the effort is going to be as a team as a solo Dev you can still do this you can still go through your backlog and estimate how hard or what the effort is in order to be able to accomplish that task I do this every other week the weeks that I'm not doing the other meeting uh other big meeting in scrum which is Sprint planning a Sprint is a uh a set amount of time that it take that you are uh going to be doing your work in so most commonly this is a two-e period so during Sprint planning you take a look at all the issues that you have refined in your backlog uh during your refinement meeting and you decide decide how many of those issues you think you can get done in the next 2 week period you put those into a Sprint and then you work on those issues for the next two weeks at the end of the two weeks you do a retro where you look at what you were able to accomplish did you get everything done did you run out of stuff in the middle of that two week uh period and you had to pull more in you look at what went well what could be better and then you take that information and you plan out your next Sprint there's one other meeting that you would normally do during an agile uh scrum process and that's the standup meeting this meeting is done on a daily basis and you evaluate where everybody is uh during the Sprint maybe you don't do that meeting as a solo Dev because you're the only one and you already know where you're at so probably don't need to have the stand up meeting but that's really the only thing in uh this process that I think you can't that isn't really necessary or can't be done as a as a solo developer this has been really useful to me as I've been working on my gamify task manager project because I have a backlog of issues that I periodically refine and load up into Sprints I always know what I can work on next when I sit down to code it may feel like doing all these extra steps filling out a backlog refining that backlog planning out these Sprints and might feel like that takes a lot of extra time but in reality it ends up saving me time because I never have to worry about knowing what's up next what to work on next following this process even as a solo dev has really made my software development process very smooth and very efficient and I've been able to get more done by following it than I would have otherwise this is just one approach to organizing a project as a solo Dev there are many many ways that you can approach this this is what I'm used to in my professional career as a developer so it made sense to just take the thing that I've been working with for over a decade and use that to help me run my solo Dev project I'm curious to know though how you manage your solo Dev Projects please tell me about it in the comments below and if you would like to receive updates about the gamified task manager that I've been talking about please subscribe to the channel I'm doing periodic updates on my progress with that app and you can see the results of this process that I'm that I'm working with thank you so much and I will see you in the next video

Channel: CreaDev Labs

Views: 16,310

Keywords: agile, agile methodology, agile project management, agile scrum, agile software development, game dev, game development, gamified task manager, github, github integration, indie game development, javascript, javascript dev, kanban, notion, pixel art, project management, scrum, shortcut, software development, software development cycle, software engineer, software engineering, solo dev, solo dev project, solo developer, solo game dev, solo game dev project, trello, web development

Id: 3do67HY3tmI

Length: 7min 41sec (461 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024