A very good book pack on this topic is ISBN 0735605971, especially Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell (again). The latter one has a lot of templates and checklists, suitable mostly for larger projects.

A nice, if somewhat pedantic book on planning your personal work is Introduction to the Personal Software Process (ISBN 0201548097). It contains a lot of advice of how to monitor your own work process, including a lot of forms to record more or less relevant information. While the whole pack might be more of use to really bureaucratic types, the part on time recording and the part on recording defects in your programs are definitively worth reading.

Third, I want to follow up the recommendation by lachoy on the Pragmatic Programmer book. If you want to enjoy the wisdom of this book on your command line (similar to the Unix fortune command), try this script.

And, last but not least, never forget that planning has something to do with thinking. Planning is not following plans blindly. Always ask: What do you really want to achieve? Everything else follows from that. Some tools for thinking (funny, eh) are taught in the aptly-titled The Thinkers Toolkit (ISBN 0812928083), which is really a cool little booklet with a good value for its price.

In fact, planning is like programming at a higher level - but with a new, ever changing runtime environment each time, and without debugger.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

Edit: chipmunk 2001-03-20

In reply to Re: Outlining a project. by clemburg
in thread Outlining a project. by providencia

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