Defect Life Cycle / Bug Life Cycle

What is Defect Life Cycle?

Defect Life Cycle / Bug Life Cycle in software testing is the specific set of states of that defect or bug goes through in its entire life. The purpose of Defect life cycle is to easily coordinate and communicate current status of defect which changes to various assignees and make the defect fixing process systematic and efficient.

Defect Status or Bug Status in defect life cycle is the present state from which the defect or a bug is currently undergoing. The goal of defect status is to precisely convey the current state or progress of a defect or bug in order to better track and understand the actual progress of the defect life cycle. The number of states that a defect goes through varies from project to project. Below lifecycle diagram, covers all possible states.

• New : When a new defect is logged and posted for the first time. It is assigned a status as NEW.

• Assigned : Once the defect is posted by the tester, the lead of the tester approves the defect and assigns the defect to the developer team. Then status of that defect is ASSIGNED.

• Open : When developer starts analyzing and works on the defect fix, then status of defect is OPEN

• Fixed : When a developer makes a necessary code change and verifies the change, he or she can make defect status as FIXED.

• Re-Test : Tester does the retesting of the code at this stage to check whether the defect is fixed by the developer or not and changes the status to RE-TEST.

• Close : If the defect is no longer exists then tester assigns the status CLOSED.

• Re-Open : If the defect persists even after the developer has fixed the defect, the tester changes the status to RE-OPEN. Once again the bug goes through the life cycle.

• Duplicate : If the defect is already raised or the defect corresponds to the same concept of the defect, the status is changed to DUPLICATE.

• Deffered : If the present defect is not of a prime priority and if it is expected to get fixed in the next release, then status DEFFERED is assigned to such defects.

• Rejected : If the developer feels the defect is not a genuine/valid defect then it changes the defect to REJECTED.