Project planning

I'm a self-taught programmer (start my CS degree when I go to uni next year). So far I've only completed small games such as pong, snake, etc. I've also created small gui programs which allow the user to interact with specific algorithms. However, I've never created something of substantial size that I couldn't just draw up a basic flow of the program and code the implementation.

I want to work on a project which is a bit more robust and complex. I'm planning on making a distributed IRC client using the asio library. I am planning on having a command line interface and be somewhat extensible.

My question is how should I go about planning it and how specific should I be?
Should I use something like UML?

Though I would eventually like to use the program for personal use, my main goal is learning how to plan, start, and finish a complex project. I plan on using a git repository to manage the code and to write documentation for it, to make it more like a realistic project.

Thank you for your time and effort,


cs_student

So far I've drawn up a detailed document which consists of core features which are a necessity to the project, then secondary features which would enhance the project.

I've also explored wikipedia for ideas about different design patterns. I've decided to use the Model-View-Controller design pattern in my project. I've been looking through the boost library asio as well as the IRC protocol, to get a better grasp of how it works so I can take this into consideration during drawing up a outline of the program.

I'm still unsure how specific I should be on my outline. Should I just determine the general flow/architecture of the program and try and make the implementation fit into it? Should I decide on the entire structure as well as major algorthms/logic I'm going to use in my program?


Thank you for your time and effort,


cs_student