KR18 Decomposition of Projects: How to Design Small Incremental Steps

The basic premise of iterative, incremental and evolutionary project management (Larman 2003) is that a project is divided into early, frequent and short duration delivery steps. One basic premise of these methods is that each step will attempt to deliver some real value to stakeholders. While it is not difficult to envisage the steps of construction for a system; there is often difficulty in carrying out decomposition into steps when each step has to deliver something of value to stakeholders, in particular to end-users. This paper gives some guidelines, policies and principles for decomposition. It also gives a short example from practical experience. The evolutionary project management method (Evo) is used (Gilb 2005).