Product Defects: Product Defects are the defects that are introduced and detected during the various stages of software development life cycle. While the defects get introduced during the various activities of the phase, the detection occurs during reviews and various types of testing efforts.

The various types of defects occuring during the SDLC activities can be categorized as follows:

- Functionality Errors
- External Interface Errors
- Performance Problems
- Environment Errors

Examples of SDLC defects:

Requirements: Performance Exceptions of the system not properly defined
Design: Program Specifications did not specify of number of decimal places
Design: Architecture was not perperly planned
Coding: Variable no initialized, Missing if condition

Process Defects: Process defects are caused during execution of project and usually detected during audits. While such defects get introduced during various project activities and get detected during various conducted during the project life cycle. All such defects are of the nature of deviations in process implementations of the organization or the project. Though it is difficult to draw a co-relation between process and product defects, however, the existence of process defects are indicative of larger number of product defects. Also, existence of such defects raise a question mark about the quality of the software product.

Examples of Process Defects:

- Risk Management Plan is not in place
- Change request impact on schedule and effort not reflected
- Project Management Plan not kept up to date with current status of the project
- Requirements tracking is incomplete
- Review Plan is not adequate
- Requirements gathering strategy not defined for the product
- Quality goals are not tracked
- Issue tracking mechanism is adhoc