During the creation and review process of software engineering specifications, developers seek to anticipate the design and development of a product before work on the product begins. Labor developers expend during early planning stages tends to substantially reduce rework during late stages. The people who write specifications can tremendously aid the development process if they employ basic iteration and prototyping techniques as they guide the document creation process. Software configuration management (SCM) practices provide ready models for iteration and prototyping. One model depicts a six-stage process in which developers see the product evolve from a scratch to a release condition. Use of such models will assist writers to guide document creation processes and will bring the documentation process itself into line with other software development management techniques.