Guidelines to establish Defect Life Cycle

Defect life cycle, as name suggests, simply means overall journey of defect starting from its identification by testing team till its fixation and closure either by development team in software testing. Defect is closed by ensuring that either defect is not reproducible or defect is rejected by development team.

Software defect is basically defined as a situation where software does not fulfill requirements expected. One has to deal with development and release simply in order to completely handle project in more appropriate manner. But one should also know that along with development and release, they also need to learn about how to handle defects that occur.

In such situations, Defect life cycle is needed to control and handle defects in more appropriate and effective manner. From one project to another, total number of states that a defect has to go through varies. A defect can be generated at any stage of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), it might be present in requirements gathering, software design, development phase, testing phase, or customer acceptance testing done by end-user at the time of using product.

Guidelines to establish Defect Life Cycle
Guidelines are basic protocols that are needed to be followed to successfully implement Defect life cycle. These guidelines are given below :

1. Understand about defect states :
   It is obvious that before we start to work on something like project, we need to know about each and every related to that particular project, about its different states, its design, working, etc. Similarly, in defect life cycle, before we start to work on defects, the entire team needs to fully and clearly understand different states of defect and what each defect state exactly means.
2. Understand responsibility :
   Each individual should know about their responsibility before starting to work on something for more efficient and better results. If individuals do not know about their responsibilities then they won’t work with full determination, won’t give full efforts, and will be less focused on their duties or responsibilities. As a result, consequences will get increased, and results obtained will not be accurate and correct. Therefore, it is needed to ensure that each individual knows about their responsibility. Similarly, in defect life cycle, each individual who has been assigned any tasks that is related to defect life cycle should know and understand their responsibility very clearly so that more accurate and better results are obtained.
3. Defect tracking tool :
   One should avoid accepting any request related to defect without any appropriate change in defect status in defect tracking tool. This tool should be handled and controlled with more care simply to maintain consistency among defects. This will maintain consistency in workflow of defect life cycle. If anyone takes shortcuts, then we will never be able to get up-to-date and reliable defect metrics for analysis.
4. Proper Documentation :

   Defect life cycle should be properly documented in more appropriate manner. If documentation process is done properly, then there won’t be any confusion and any issues related to any state in future.