Hephaestus will contain six main phases. The first five phases cover its span of the product lifecycle, and the sixth evaluates the effectiveness of Hephaestus as a development process.
Certain phases may be either broken down further, or combined, in order to address scalability concerns. All phases are iterative; changes in any phase may necessitate changes in previous phases. Details will be explicitly spelled out in the Hephaestus User Document.
The phases listed below and the line items in Figure 1 are not intended to be isomorphic. Figure 1 shows a possible breakdown of a product lifecycle.