What Is a Draft in Writing
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A draft is a written version of a text that is not yet in its final form, however rough it is and however much of the text it covers.
The word describes a state, not a quality or an extent: a first draft can have thin dialogue, a missing subplot, and an ending the writer isn't sure of yet, and a single chapter can be a draft on its own, as one dictionary's example puts it, "the latest chapter was only a draft and not the final version". What makes it a draft is that it is written out and still open to change.
What it isn't is a plan for a text, no matter how detailed that plan gets.
Where the confusion comes from
A richly developed outline sometimes gets called a "first draft," especially once it's long enough to feel substantial. That blurs something useful.
An outline, however thorough, still describes the book from outside it; a draft is the book itself, in its own sentences, with its own rhythm, however unfinished that rhythm is. The difference matters because a plan can be endlessly perfected without ever producing the thing a plan is for.
How this shows up in a real novel
Gustave Flaubert's drafting process for Madame Bovary (1857) is documented in his own letters as famously slow, sometimes two pages in a week, and in his surviving papers as layered: scenarios written before the drafting began, then drafts made page by page, about seven versions of a page on average, then one final manuscript, dated from September 1851 to April 1856, written part after part.
No pass covered the whole book before that final manuscript, which from its second part on reads like a clean copy. What the papers show is a text built page by page, each version a draft of what it covers, with the scenarios written beforehand standing apart from the drafts proper.
While you're drafting
As a working habit, a first draft only has to reach the end; the impulse to perfect a scene before moving to the next one usually does more to stall a manuscript than any actual weakness in the writing itself.
Questions
Does a draft have to be good to count as a draft? No. The word describes a version that is not yet in its final form, not how strong any part of it is. A rough first draft is still fully a draft.
Is a detailed outline the same as a first draft? No. An outline describes the book from the outside, in summary. A draft is the text itself, or a part of it, written in its own sentences, however unfinished those sentences still are.
How many drafts does a novel usually take? There's no fixed number, and it varies enormously by writer and by project. Flaubert's papers for Madame Bovary show about seven versions of a page on average, and then one final manuscript written part after part.