Before writing any code, I'd like to take the time to plan out what I want to accomplish in my project and scope out a minimum viable product (MVP) to aim for prior to building out any advanced functionalities. This helps with the prioritization of what key components of our app are necessary to have a functioning prototype so that we can have something up and running.
For me, the MVP is a fantastic way to quantify my ideas into something I can interact with and use to validate any assumptions I have, or catch any edge cases, while spending the minimum amount of time necessary on coming to those conclusions. Here's how I approach feature planning:
- What does the product I'm building do?
- Ideally, what are some of the highlighting features that make this application stand out?
- Which of the features on the preceding list are necessary to have a working product? Once you know the necessary features, cut out everything that doesn't give you the bare-bones functionality.
- Give some thought to its design, but don't stress on every single detail just yet.
With these intentions in mind, here's what I've come up with:
- This is an application that will let me create and track a list of tasks that I have. These can be as small as a shopping list or as big as long-term goals.
- I'd like to set a reminder for each unique task so that I can get to each one in an orderly fashion. Ideally, the items on the list can be grouped into categories. Category grouping could perhaps be simplified by something like icons. This way, I can also sort and filter my list by icons.
- The only things that are necessary from the beginning are that I can use a text input field to type a task, have it rendered onto a list of items, and mark them off as they are completed; everything else is secondary.
Now that we've got a clearer picture of our app, let's break down some actionable steps we can take to make it a reality:
- Let's generate a list of default items. These don't have to be manually entered as we just want to see our list populated in the app itself.
- After that, your users should be able to input their own tasks using a text field and the native keyboard.
- Next, I'd like to make that list scrollable in case my list of tasks spans past an entire vertical screen's height.
- Then, we should let items be marked as complete with some sort of visual indicator.
That's it! These are the four goals we currently have. As I previously mentioned, everything else is secondary for the time being. For now, we just want to get an MVP up and running, and then we will tweak it to our hearts' content later.
Let's move ahead and start thinking about architecture.
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