The following description of an iteration is from the draft System Life Cycle document.

In addition to the breakdown of the engineering and production activities into four stages, each phase is further decomposed into a sequence of eight week long iterations (Figure 5). Each iteration constitutes two weeks of design activities, five weeks of more detailed definition and production activities, and one week of documentation and report out leading to either the next iteration or a milestone review as shown in Figure 3. As a consequence, there are two iterations in each of the inception and elaboration phases and three iterations in the construction phase. The transition phase does not utilize this iterative style, as its goal is to deploy the integrated CI into the marine infrastructure constituting the physical assets of the OOI. The emphasis within the iterations evolves from exploratory design during inception to disciplined production during construction.

The focus of the design period is to refine the iteration task list per development team, based on risk assessment, prioritization and resource availability; to perform a task allocation to development team members; and to develop the necessary designs for the remainder of the iteration in the context of the overarching release architecture.

The focus of the development period is on executing the iteration tasks and developing specifications and tested software in accordance with designs.

The focus of the wrap-up period is to document, peer review, integration test, fix bugs and prepare an initial scoping and task list for the next iteration.