Waterfall is an abstraction model for software design which translates requirements into lists of simple routines and arranges them in a sequence of phases based on dependencies.
In Javascript, Elan Shanker's async-waterfall package organizes series of functions with callback completions into waterfalls. It runs an array of functions in series, each passing their results to the next in the array. However, if any of the functions pass an error to the callback, the next function is not executed and the main callback is immediately called with the error.
In chart design, a waterfall chart is a form of data visualization that helps in understanding the cumulative effect of sequentially introduced positive or negative values. These intermediate values can either be time based or category based.
