Informal Iteration Process:
Most of the creative work for a stage occurs here. Participants work together to gather additional information and refine stage inputs into draft deliverables. Activities of this stage may include interviews, meetings, the generation of prototypes, and electronic correspondence. All of these communications are deemed informal, and are not recorded as minutes, documents of record, controlled software, or official memoranda.
The intent here is to encourage, rather than inhibit the communication process. This process concludes when the majority of participants agree that the work is substantially complete and it is time to generate draft deliverables for formal review and comment.

Formal Iteration Process
In this process, draft deliverables are generated for formal review and comment. Each deliverable was introduced during the kickoff process, and is intended to satisfy one or more outputs for the current stage. Each draft deliverable is given a version number and placed under configuration management control.
As participants review the draft deliverables, they are responsible for reporting errors found and concerns they may have to the Primary Developer Representative via electronic mail. The Primary Developer Representative in turn consolidates these reports into a series of issues associated with a specific version of a deliverable. The person in charge of developing the deliverable works to resolve these issues then releases another version of the deliverable for review. This process iterates until all issues are resolved for each deliverable. There are no formal check off / signature forms for this part of the process. The intent here is to encourage review and feedback.
At the discretion of the Primary Developer Representative and Primary End-user Representative, certain issues may be reserved for resolution in later stages of the development lifecycle. These issues are disassociated from the specific deliverable, and tagged as "open issues." Open issues are reviewed during the kickoff meeting for each subsequent stage.
Once all issues against a deliverable have been resolved or moved to open status, the final (release) draft of the deliverable is prepared and submitted to the Primary Developer Representative. When final drafts of all required stage outputs have been received, the Primary Developer Representative reviews the final suite of deliverables, reviews the amount of labor expended against this stage of the project, and uses this information to update the project plan.
The project plan update includes a detailed list of tasks, their schedule and estimated level of effort for the next stage. The stages following the next stage (out stages) in the project plan are updated to include a high level estimate of schedule and level of effort, based on current project experience.
Out stages are maintained at a high level in the project plan, and are included primarily for informational purposes; direct experience has shown that it is very difficult to accurately plan detailed tasks and activities for out stages in a software development lifecycle. The updated project plan and schedule is a standard deliverable for each stage of the project. The Primary Developer Representative then circulates the updated project plan and schedule for review and comment, and iterates these documents until all issues have been resolved or moved to open status.
Once the project plan and schedule has been finalized, all final deliverables for the current stage are made available to all project participants, and the Primary Developer Representative initiates the next process.