Activity: Iteration Acceptance Review

Roles and Activities > Manager Role Set > Project Reviewer > Iteration Acceptance Review

Purpose To formally accept the work of an iteration as being completed
Steps Schedule Iteration Acceptance Review meeting Distribute meeting materials Conduct Iteration Acceptance Review Meeting Record decision
Input Artifacts: Iteration Assessment Iteration Plan	Resulting Artifacts: Review Record
Frequency: Once per iteration
Role: Project Reviewer

Workflow Details:

Project Management

Manage Iteration

The Iteration Acceptance Review is a formal review between the project team and a customer representative. The objective of the review is to reach agreement that each of the iteration evaluation criteria has been satisfied, and that the project is ready to proceed with the next iteration.

Schedule Iteration Acceptance Meeting

The Iteration Acceptance Review meeting is a meeting between a customer representative and the project's management team (the project manager, plus the team leads for the various functional areas of the project team). Representative(s) of the Project Review Authority may also be involved.

Once the attendees of the meeting have been identified, set a date/time for the meeting to take place. It is important that you provide sufficient lead time to allow the participants to review the materials that will be used as the basis for the approval decision.

Distribute Meeting Materials

Prior to the meeting, distribute the Iteration Assessment to the reviewers. Make sure it is sent out sufficiently in advance of the meeting to allow the reviewers adequate time to review it.

Conduct Iteration Acceptance Review Meeting

During the meeting, the attendees review the iteration evaluation criteria (as documented in the Iteration Plan), and the results of the Assess Iteration activity (as documented in the Iteration Assessment).

For each of the criteria the group should determine and agree whether or not the test and review results demonstrated that the requirements of each criterion have been met.
If the requirements of a criterion have not been satisfied, the group should identify the corrective actions required in order to achieve compliance.

At the end of the meeting, the reviewers should make their approval decision. If some of the iteration criteria have not been satisfied, the group may still decide to accept the iteration and defer any corrective actions into the next iteration. You might take this approach if the deficiencies were minor. However, you might also defer corrective actions if the deficiencies were very significant (e.g. failure of a chosen technology infrastructure) and required a significant change of approach in the project. In this situation you would initiate a new iteration to deal with the issues arising.

The result of the Iteration Acceptance Review can be one of the following:

Iteration Accepted	The customer representative and the project team agree that the deliverables for this iteration are satisfactory, and the project should proceed to the next iteration.
Iteration Not Accepted	The evaluation criteria have not been achieved, and corrective actions are required before the work of the iteration can be considered complete.

If the iteration is not accepted, the project team should schedule the corrective actions that have been identified, and re-submit a revised Iteration Assessment for a follow-up review.

Record Decision

At the end of the meeting, a Review Record is completed capturing any important discussions or action items, and recording the result of the Iteration Acceptance Review. If the result was "not accepted" a follow-up Iteration Acceptance Review Meeting should be scheduled for a later date.

Rational Unified Process