As one skims through the list, the first thing that might stand out is that a third of the steps are data centric, including the first detailed analysis step (study data streams and persistant data). For many programmers starting with data may seem counter intuitive. Programming is about making data do something, and code is where the action is.

On the contrary, this is exactly how I approach things.

After all, data is where the action is; code is just transforming one set of data into another. The data you start with and the data you want to end up with are what determines what code you need. And, a data model (not necessarily the data model you encode into your database or file format or whatever) is a proxy for the customer needs as well.

The first question I ask (of myself, if not necessarily of other people) on any project is "what data are we dealing with?" You can't figure out what the code needs to do until you know how the data will be organized, and you can't figure out how to organize the data until you know what data you have. Of course, you can't figure out how your data can best be organized until you know what you'll do with it to, so it's totally a back-and-forth process between data and process, but understanding of both preceeds code.

Everybody Knows that you need both data and process understanding to figure out how to organize everything, and that they each impact the other, so you have to get both together and let them hammer out the necessary compromises. But, IMO, any given person thinks of one or the other first, and then applies the other to it.

I feel like this is one of those dichotomies by which you can classify types of programmers. Not that it reveals anything vital by the classification, but at least it helps you communicate across the gap by realizing it's there. And it doesn't mean that you necessarily think your primary grabbing point is the more important. I'm very much a data guy, but I'm well aware that the processes are vital things to understand to build the data model. I just start with the data itself.