1. customer visits: find out who's using Director and similar tools. What do they need?
2. Prepare MRD which lists a handful of general themes which Director must address. Specify some ideal release date.
3. From the current list of suggested features, choose those that meet the needs of the MRD. Evaluate their "bang."
4. Dev engineers estimate the amount of work necessary to complete each feature in this long list. ("buck")
5. Dev Management sorts features list according to bang-to-buck ratio.
6. Engineering Management chooses a feature set that balances the themes and can be implemented within the time constraints set by the ship date.
7. Dev and QA engineers choose which features they'd like to work on. Dev nad QA managers arbitrate conflicts and balance loads.
8. Feature crews form and analyze their features. They write functional specifications.
9. Engineering team reviews and evaluates functional specifications for completeness, accuracy, correctness, adhgerence to user interface rules, etc.
10. When specs are approved, feature crews begin work. Engineer begins coding while QA designs the test plan. Engineer reviews test plan. When first code is delivered, QA starts implementing it. The QA and Dev engineers work closely (and ideally have cubes physically close together) to perfect the feature.
11. Depending on the length of the development cycle, there may be zero or more intermediate integration phases. Completed features are integrated into the build and the first usable ("alpha") release is made.
12. Engineering announces thatthe product is "feature complete" and engineers are forbidden to add last-minute unspecified features. From here on out they must only fix bugs.
13. When all features are complete, QA begins its beta certification. When that is complete, the first beta release is made.
14. Life becomes a surreal endless bug cycle: QA engineers run their test suites and report bugs. Dev engineers fix them. QA engieers regress them. QA manager uses the bugbase to analyze the state of the product and predict the ship date. Beta users submit bugs and QA engineers try to classify them all as "known." Beta users suggest new features and everybody ignores them.
15. The end is in sight as the rate, severity and type of bugs being found all decrease and the projected ship date stops moving out.
16. Director finally ships. The VP of engineering takes the whole product team out to dinner at an expensive restaurant. Dev and QA engineers meet the documentation writers and marketeers.

Director Product Development Cycle
Michael Roeder. December, 1999