A project team has been tracking defect trends over five sprints. The data shows defects found increasing from 15 to 42, defects fixed increasing from 12 to 35, but remaining defects accumulating from 3 to 18. What does this trend MOST likely indicate?

The team's testing effectiveness is improving as they identify more defects each sprint

Technical debt is accumulating faster than it's being resolved, indicating a quality management issue

The increasing defect count shows the product is becoming more complex, which is normal for iterative development

The team should reduce testing efforts in the next sprint to focus on fixing existing defects