What does the term "defect lifecycle" refer to?

The term "defect lifecycle" refers to the process that a defect goes through from its discovery to its resolution. This includes various stages such as identification, categorization, assignment, resolution, and closure. Understanding this lifecycle is crucial for effective quality assurance, as it helps teams manage defects systematically, ensuring that they are adequately tracked and addressed.

The defect lifecycle typically encompasses stages such as reporting the defect, reviewing it, prioritizing its fix, implementing a solution, and ultimately validating the fix before the defect is closed. By understanding and managing this lifecycle, QA professionals can improve software quality and reduce the likelihood of defects escaping into production.

The other choices, while relevant to different aspects of software development, do not specifically pertain to the journey of a defect. The series of steps a software application goes through to be released is more about the software development lifecycle, not defects specifically. Similarly, the lifecycle of a project refers to broader project management phases rather than focusing exclusively on defects. Lastly, the phases of user training for new software are related to user onboarding and support, which is a different domain altogether.