The critical priority analysis generates a list of critical tasks. It is absolutely necessary to successfully accomplish a critical task. The project will succeed or fail based on the outcome of these tasks. Some projects may have more than one critical task.
There are two major categories of critical tasks. One category of tasks are associated with the building of the system. These are the critical tasks that the teams must accomplish well. An example might be a high-quality implementation of a critical section of code in the system.
The other category of critical tasks are associated with the system itself. These are the critical tasks that the system, once built, must accomplish well. An example might be the successful flying of an airplane under automatic pilot.
It is absolutely necessary to successfully accomplish both categories of critical tasks.
Not all methodologies have critical priority analysis as a well defined task. Later in the thesis it will be shown that the setting of priorities will play a significant role in methodology's performance characteristics. Critical priority analysis is one of the key features of the WaterSluice software engineering methodology.