Defect Action Lifecycle

Defect Actions are associated with Defects and represent the work - Development or Testing - that needs to be done to resolve the problem defined by the Defect.

The Defect Action lifecycle includes these states:

Evaluate

Defect Actions are created in the Evaluate state. The name of the Defect Action is the same as the Defect it was created for. In the Evaluate state, the Defect Action can be promoted to Open or Test. It can also be promoted directly to Rejected.

Open

Defect Actions in this state have been either committed for a fix in a specific Product that has not yet been released, or placed in a backlog of Defects for future targeting for a Model as a Candidate Item.

After the assignee completes the work required to resolve the Defect Action, they manually promote the Defect Action to the Test state. They can also directly promote the Defect Action to the Rejected state. If a Defect Action has dependent Defect Actions, all of those Defect Actions must be in the Test, Closed, or Rejected state before this Defect Action can be promoted to Test.

Test

This Defect Action has been fixed by the development assignee, and the quality assignee must text the changes to verify that the problem has been fixed without introducing different problems.

The quality assignee executes whatever tasks are required to verify that the changes made for the Defect Action resolved the problem. If everything works as expected, the Defect Action can be promoted to the Closed state. If the problem still exists, or the fix broke something else, the quality assignee can demote the Defect action back to the Open or Evaluate state.

Closed

A Defect Action can be promoted to Closed once its fix has been verified and all of its dependent Defect Actions have been closed or rejected.

When all Defect Actions are promoted to the Closed or Rejected states (with at least one in the Closed state), the associated Defect is automatically promoted to the Closed state. Once a Defect Action is closed, it cannot be rejected. If needed, you can demote the Defect Action to Test and then reject it.

Rejected

Rejecting a Defect Action means that the changes to be made as defined within the Defect Action should not be made. It does not mean that a fix implemented by a development assignee did not resolve the issue.

When a Defect Action is rejected, it is removed from any Product Revision (where it is defined as an Affected Item) or Model (where it is defined as a Candidate Item).