The growing industrial take-up of spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs), their constantly increasing sophistication, and the scarcity of teams which master the full system complexity as well as all the necessary steps in the SLDSs life-cycle, has created a felt need for a best practice model for development and evaluation of SLDSs. An obvious first step towards establishing a best practice model is to build a solid overview of current practice. This paper presents a model for the description of SLDS current practice with particular focus on dialogue management and human factors.