Team Split Assessment

Plan Under Review

File: ux-design/components/plan/goal.md
Date: 2026-03-24

Complexity Analysis

Factor	Value	Threshold	Assessment
Total tasks	~30 (13 items in Wave 0b + 15 components + barrel/integration)	15	Over
Sequential phases with dependencies	6 (0a, 0b, 1, 2, 3, 4)	2	Over
Distinct persona types	2 (front-end-engineer, quality-reviewer)	4	Under
Working directories	1 (ux-prototype)	1	At threshold
Cross-cutting concerns	2 (barrel exports, design token consistency)	1	Over
Tasks with external validation	6 (wave gates: lint + build + test)	5	Over

Qualitative factors:

Context window pressure: High — 19 components with detailed props interfaces, test specs, and story specs will exhaust context if tracked by a single team lead.
Error blast radius: Moderate — Wave 0b structural changes (file moves, import updates) affect all subsequent waves. Isolating them limits risk.
Natural phase boundaries: Clear — each wave has an explicit gate (lint + build + tests pass).

Recommendation

Split — The project exceeds thresholds on 4 of 6 factors and has clear natural phase boundaries at each wave gate. Context window pressure from tracking 19 component implementations argues for splitting into runs that can be executed with fresh context.

Proposed Runs

Run	Directory	Description	Tasks	Personas	Notes
1	`run-1-infrastructure/`	Wave 0a + 0b: deps, scaffolding, primitives, types, mocks, primitive stories	~16	front-end-engineer	Structural changes, no new components
2	`run-2-foundation/`	Wave 1: foundation components (utilities, Badge, Avatar, CopyrightAcknowledgment, ImageDisplay, ImageDropZone, ImagePreviewEditor)	~8	front-end-engineer	Leaf components, parallelizable
3	`run-3-composition/`	Wave 2: composition components (ImageHoverPreview, ImageInspectorOverlay, ImageComparisonLayout, ImageFormField)	~4	front-end-engineer	Depend on Wave 1 outputs
4	`run-4-grid-organism/`	Wave 3 + 4: grid atoms, ImageUploadDialog, item-grid-columns integration, barrel exports	~6	front-end-engineer	Most complex components, integration

Artifact Flow

Run 1 produces:
  - utilities/ directory with types, getInitials, getCroppedImage
  - ShadCN primitives (alert-dialog, checkbox, popover, progress, slider, aspect-ratio)
  - Badge error-overlay variant
  - Mock data module
  - Primitive context stories

Run 2 consumes Run 1 outputs, produces:
  - ImageDisplay, ImageDropZone, ImagePreviewEditor molecules
  - CopyrightAcknowledgment atom
  - Avatar refactor (getInitials import)
  - Badge stories update

Run 3 consumes Run 2 outputs, produces:
  - ImageHoverPreview, ImageInspectorOverlay, ImageComparisonLayout, ImageFormField

Run 4 consumes Run 3 outputs, produces:
  - ImageCellDisplay, ImageCellEditor (atoms/grid/image/)
  - ImageUploadDialog organism
  - item-grid-columns update
  - Barrel exports in canary.ts

Risk Analysis

Splitting mitigates:

Context window exhaustion from tracking 19 component specs simultaneously
Cascading failures from Wave 0b structural changes (file moves, import paths)
Difficulty diagnosing build failures across unrelated component groups

Coordination overhead:

Low — all runs target the same repository on a single feature branch
Hand-offs are filesystem-only (committed code from prior run)
Single worktree for all runs (sequential execution)

Worktree Strategy

Parent branch: main (up-to-date with origin before branching)
Base branch: jmpicnic/item-image-upload-components (created off main)
Worktrees: One per run when parallelism within a run risks update conflicts. Runs with fully independent tasks (e.g., Run 2 with 5 leaf components) may use multiple worktrees. All worktrees merge back to the base branch at the end of each wave.

Worktree naming

image-components-worktrees/<run-or-task>

Examples:

image-components-worktrees/run-1 — single worktree for sequential Run 1
image-components-worktrees/run-2-display — parallel agent in Run 2
image-components-worktrees/run-2-dropzone — parallel agent in Run 2

Branch naming for parallel agents

Each parallel worktree gets its own branch off the base branch: jmpicnic/item-image-upload-components/<task> (e.g., jmpicnic/item-image-upload-components/image-display).

At the end of the wave, each task branch is merged into the base branch jmpicnic/item-image-upload-components, conflicts resolved, and the gate validated.

Cleanup

Worktrees removed after each wave gate passes. Parent worktree directory removed after final PR is merged.

Open Questions and Decisions

#	Question	Options	Recommendation	Decision
1	Should Runs 2 and 3 use parallel agents within each run?	(a) Sequential single agent, (b) 2-3 parallel agents per run	(b) Parallel within Run 2 (8 components are leaf-level and independent)	Pending