The closing meeting is the phase during the review process where all identified issues, findings, and observations are finalized, documented, and agreed upon by all participants. This step ensures that there's clarity on the identified defects and the action items required to rectify them.

Configuration Management (CM) in CI/CD pipelines manages and tracks changes to ensure that all configurations are consistently integrated and deployed. This means CM keeps a record of all versions, changes, and configurations so that teams can retrieve previous versions and configurations if needed, ensuring repeatability and recoverability. The primary role of CM is to provide a controlled method to manage changes to both the application code and the environments where the application runs.

The primary goal of "Risk Identification" is to list out or pinpoint all potential threats or risks that could impact the quality or timeline of the project. While the root cause analysis, documentation, and prioritization are essential, they come after the risks have been clearly identified.

The choice of tools for automated testing often depends on the software's architecture. Different architectures might require specialized tools or have certain constraints that make one tool more suited over another. For instance, a web application and a mobile application would have different automation tool requirements.

Git is a widely-used Configuration Management tool. It helps developers track and control changes in the software, allowing multiple developers to collaborate on a project simultaneously without interfering with each other's changes, and helps maintain version history.

The Test Manager oversees the entire testing process and ensures that all testing activities align with the project timelines and budget. They coordinate between stakeholders and the testing team, ensuring that the testing phase progresses smoothly.

Automated test suites, which consist of a collection of test scripts, test data, and execution sequences, require effective management to ensure organized execution and reporting. Test Management tools offer capabilities to define, organize, and execute tests, as well as to report defects and generate metrics, streamlining the automation workflow.

Decision Coverage in white-box testing ensures that each decision point or branch has been executed for both 'true' and 'false' conditions. It is more robust than simple statement coverage because it ensures that each decision leads the control flow in both directions.

Exit criteria in the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) are a pre-defined set of conditions or metrics which must be achieved to conclude a testing phase. These conditions could include factors like achieving a certain percentage of test coverage, a limited number of high-severity defects remaining open, meeting performance benchmarks, etc. Having a clear exit criteria ensures that a testing phase achieves its intended quality objectives before moving to the next phase.

Error Guessing is a technique where testers use their experience to guess the problematic areas of an application and create tests specifically for those areas. In this scenario, the tester's discovery of an uncommon defect based on past experiences aligns with the principles of Error Guessing.

The Test Designer is responsible for creating detailed test cases based on system requirements. They closely collaborate with business analysts, developers, and stakeholders to understand the functionality and behavior of the application to be tested.

"Inherent risks" are the risks that exist in the absence of any control or action to address them. It's the natural level of risk that exists. "Residual risks" are the remaining risks after controls and actions have been applied to mitigate the inherent risks.