As the complexity of today?s products increases, single projects, single departments or even single companies can no longer develop total products, causing concurrent and distributed development. Today and worldwide, industries are facing complex product development and its vast array of associated problems, relating to project organization, project control and product quality. Many processes will become distributed as well.

The defect detection process, so important for measuring and eventually achieving product quality, is typically one of the first to experience problems caused by the distributed nature of the project. The distribution of defect detection activities over several parties introduces risks like the inadequate review of work products, occurrence of "blind spots" with respect to test coverage or over-testing of components. Lifecycle-wide coordination of defect detection is therefore needed to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of defect detection activities.

To adequately reflect the distributed nature of development projects, a lifecycle is needed that explicitly addresses the project's context. A well-defined lifecycle supports and facilitates the design of a suitable test approach and strategy, and could be beneficial to other issues related to distributed development projects as well. However, despite the existence of supporting standards, the construction of a project-specific lifecycle (lifecycle modeling) is far from trivial.