Authors do not define what they mean by phase delay.

[timm]

Reveiwer1:

• Authors do not define what they mean by phase delay. That makes it very difficult to evaluate the claims and the relationship to prior work.

Reviewer3:

• I find the initial statement of the first two hypothesis to be unclear. When you say "across phases" I thought you were meaning when the defect survived across phases - but actually you did not (necessarily) mean that. You simply meant "over the corse of the software lifecycle." And "as the phase delay increases" is not clear because you haven't clearly defined "phase delay". Your descriptions of both in the conclusion are much more clear - but why do you have two different ways of stating the hypothesis? Please be clear and consistent when you are stating the research questions.