Project planning 2025-2026 (#47)

* WIP - 2025-2026 project planning

* 2025-2026 project planning

Author: oscarhermoso

docs/2025-2026-summer-intermediate/project-planning.md

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+# The Basics of Software Project Planning
+
+Why are we planning at all?
+
+- Helps break down a large project into manageable pieces
+- Helps prioritise important features (and deprioritise unnecessary ones)
+- Enables your team to complete work in parallel
+
+## Approach
+
+Top-down approach:
+
+1. Goals
+2. Personas
+3. User journey
+4. Writing tickets
+   1. Features
+   2. Sub-tasks
+   3. Bugs
+
+Not strictly linear.
+
+## Goals
+
+What are you trying to achieve?
+
+- Portfolio projects: want to showcase skills (needs to look good)
+- Solving a problem: want to help users in some way
+
+What is out of scope?
+
+(Hint: For an MVP, don't worry about cybersecurity, performance, accessibility, etc.)
+
+## Personas
+
+Who are you building this for?
+
+Common personas:
+
+- Users
+- Client (if applicable)
+- Developers (you and your team)
+
+## User Journey
+
+Once you've identified personas, features naturally take a user story format:
+
+> "As a [persona], I want [feature], so that [benefit]."
+
+You should do some research here - look at similar applications.
+
+Good to do some light wireframing here - sketch out the pages of your application.
+
+## Writing Tickets
+
+Recommend breaking down work into vertical slices (as explained below).
+
+Alternatively, can break down tasks into horizontal layers first (frontend/backend/database), but this can lead to bottlenecks.
+
+### Features
+
+Normally 1 user story per feature ticket, but may occasionally have a few user stories per feature.
+
+Define "Acceptance Criteria" for each ticket. Example format:
+
+> - MUST be able to [action]
+> - MUST NOT be able to [action]
+> - SHOULD have tests
+
+### Sub-tasks
+
+- UX/UI Design (Figma, etc)
+- Frontend Implementation
+- Backend APIs
+- Database Modelling
+- Deployment
+
+### Bugs
+
+Take the format:
+
+> Steps to reproduce:
+> 1. [Step one]
+> 2. [Step two]
+> ...
+>
+> Expected result:
+> [What you expected to happen]
+>
+> Actual result:
+> [What actually happened]
+>
+> Extra info:
+> [Browser, error logs, etc]
+
+## Some parting advice
+
+- Everything that I've said is advice, not rules
+- Revisit your goals often
+- Done is better than perfect
+- AI is a trap for defining goals & requirements