How I Start a Project From Scratch

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Every project on this site starts the same way. Not with code, but with a document, because the cheapest place to find a mistake is in a sentence, before anything has been built on top of it. This is the roadmap I follow, from the first idea to a system that is ready to use:

Create a brainstorm document for the project, with ideas about its nature, its implementation and the technologies to use.
Refine the brainstorm into four initial documents: Project Overview, Technology Stack, Workflow and Business Rules.
Formalise them into a Vision Document, a System Requirements Document and a Use Case Specification Document.
Review the documents, improve them, and review them again until they match what the project is meant to be.
Create GitHub issues for the initial scaffold and infrastructure.
Create a GitHub issue for each use case, linked to a GitHub Project and to an MVP milestone.
Implement the initial scaffold and infrastructure.
Implement one use case after another, including unit and functional tests.
For each use case, run the tests and fix until all of them pass, and only then move on to the next one.
Run a final test of the full functionality and fix any issue found, repeating until the system is ready.

The ten steps fall into four phases:

Requirements on Artur Rios Lab

How I Start a Project From Scratch