Beginning the Process

At the beginning of the project, in an iterative process, the analysis, design, implementation, and test phases are broken into many potential tasks yet to be accomplished by team members. Each potential task is assigned a priority by team members. This priority reflects the benefit to the final goal of accomplishing the task based on what has already been accomplished. The highest priority task is accomplished next. Depending on the size of the team, multiple high priority tasks may be accomplished in parallel. The remaining, lower priority tasks are held for later review. Exactly how many tasks or the granularity of the tasks is dependent on the size of the project, the size of the team building the project, and the scheduled delivery time for the project.

It is important that the decomposition of the problem is done well, regardless of the methodology being used, but especially here in the WaterSluice methodology because priority needs to be accessed. The better the decomposition and priority setting, the more efficient this methodology will perform. More comments on this topic are deferred to a later section. See section C.5 on enabling paradigms located on page .