What methodology to use for planning/developing a Language conversion project?

I am trying to help my friend by creating a part of his on-going project. What i'm going to do is create a java parser to break up the java code into operators, parameters etc to build xml representation. Next I want to create a code generator to convert the parsed java code to XML conforming to the schema I've created. Finally I want to use an XML style-sheet to transform the XML into another programming language type. I hope this makes sense as I'm new to the area of programming. Basically I just wanted some advice on which methodology/model I should use for documenting/planning and developing this project. Is there some benefit to using Agile etc for instance? Thanks in Advance.

- Andrew;)

Google for something like "one man development methodology". There's lots of advice already given on different methodologies so I won't repeat it here. One thing I would say is developing on your own takes a huge amount of discipline, it's so easy to get sidetracked so make sure you set targets and stick to them.

On the subject of solving your problem, before you go to all the trouble of writing a parser you might want to look at the features the JavaDoc tool provides. You can write doclets for the JavaDocs tool and get it to parse the Java code for you.