Whether you are new to C# or have been doing it for years, you’ve probably done this: You get a new idea to work on and the first thing you do is open Visual Studio. Sound familiar? Maybe you aren’t even sure what the problem is yet. Let me explain with a story.

When my in-laws built an apartment onto our house to live in, my father-in-law drew up an architectural design for the addition. He didn’t start by digging the foundation. He started with plans. Why? Because those plans provided him with two key benefits: a clear path forward and inexpensive changes. Having plans allowed him to tell the sub-contractors where to dig and how much to dig. But it also allowed us to review the plan before digging started. For instance, he rearranged the floorplan a couple of times before construction started. Doing so just cost the time of creating a new drawing. What do you think it would cost to do that once the apartment was built?

Software development is no different. A good plan tells you how to build your project so that you can avoid dead-ends, rewrites, and major adjustments down the road (all of which greatly increase the likelihood of bugs). It also allows you to make major changes to your project very quickly, which saves you time and frustration later on. So why is it that we don’t plan before we build?

It turns out planning is hard. It takes effort, training, and experience to get right.

So, that’s where we are going to start. I am going to give you my free 5-step process for planning out a project. This is the process I use with clients when we plan out their project. This is also the process I have used for the past decade whenever I build a project.