Development in Action

Every successful software project begins with a solid process. Over the years, our industry has witnessed an unsettling number of projects that have missed their targets — some ran over budget, others failed to deliver the expected results, and quite a few simply fell short of quality standards.

These recurring issues did not appear by chance. They emerged from the absence of structure — and this is exactly what modern methodologies were designed to address. In essence, a methodology acts as a safety framework: it limits the number of mistakes a project team can make, while providing a set of proven patterns to navigate complex challenges.

Rather than reinventing the wheel each time, teams can rely on these well-established principles to avoid familiar pitfalls, communicate more clearly, and deliver consistently better results.

How Methodologies Help Projects Succeed

To understand the role of process in software development, it helps to explore how different methodologies shape the way teams work and make decisions. We recommend three articles that provide a clear sense of this evolution.

The first introduces Scrum, one of the most recognised frameworks within the Agile family. It demonstrates how short, structured development cycles and regular feedback help keep projects on track and aligned with client goals.

The second, P3 Express, is a lightweight yet powerful approach designed to minimise the number of mistakes a team can make. We particularly appreciate this framework because it reflects our own philosophy — focusing only on the work that directly contributes to the final solution. Every task must serve a purpose.

Finally, there is Extreme Programming (XP) — the set of practices that originally inspired our company to embrace Agile methods in the early 2000s. XP marked the beginning of our journey towards the adaptive, transparent, and highly collaborative development process that defines Software Planet Group today.

From Ideas to Requirements: Defining What Really Matters

Every project begins with understanding what the client actually wants to build. This may sound simple, but in practice, defining requirements is one of the hardest parts of software development.

If requirements are described too vaguely, the team risks building the wrong thing. But if they are documented in excessive detail, the process can stall before it even begins — endless discussions over minor points can consume valuable time without moving the project forward.

At Software Planet Group, we believe that requirements should give everyone — both the technical team and non-technical stakeholders — a clear sense of what is being built, why it matters, and how it can be prioritised. They should support collaboration, not complicate it.

That is why we describe requirements as User Stories. A user story captures a specific feature from the user’s perspective. It is not a detailed specification, but rather a concise headline that helps everyone discuss the value of that feature in context. You can read more about this approach in our article.

To complement user stories, we use acceptance criteria — clear conditions that define when a feature can be considered complete. Together, these two elements create a shared understanding of what needs to be built and how success will be measured.

Once stories and criteria are defined, the next logical step is estimation — understanding how much effort each feature will require. This is not guesswork but a structured process that we describe in more detail in our articles

Short Iterations, Real Results

Once the requirements have been defined and estimated, we move on to development — but we never attempt to build the entire system in one go. Instead, we divide the work into a series of small, fixed-length projects known as sprints. Each sprint lasts one or two weeks and represents a complete, self-contained cycle of planning, development, and delivery.

This approach addresses one of the main weaknesses of traditional project management — the risk of discovering problems only at the very end. By keeping our iterations short, we ensure that every sprint concludes with a tangible result: working features, not abstract progress reports.

At the start of each sprint, the team plans which user stories will be implemented. At the end, we hold a demo meeting, where we present what has been built — not slides, not promises, but real functionality running in the actual system.

These regular demos serve an important purpose. They allow us and our clients to review progress in real time, adjust priorities, and refine the product direction. This rhythm of short iterations and continuous feedback helps us stay aligned, responsive, and focused on what truly adds value.

You can learn more about how we run our demos in our article