Verification and Validation

The definition for verification and validation can be found at[1]:

Verification and Validation comparison

We must express some disagreement with the activities associated with the individual areas. For example, testing is not limited to Validation. Testing is also a function of verification as we will use these techniques to understand if the instantiation of the product meets the specifications.  Testing will be part of the quality assurance activities for the product – are we building what we said we would – through iterations of the product.  Big bang is dead – meaning build everything at the beginning no longer happens. That method only works in products of the smallest scope.  Rather, we will increment the feature content, verify the product build matches requirements delivered, log bugs and get ready for the next round. The next round fixes bugs, adds more of the requirements to the product content verify and so forth.

Likewise for Validation, there are things other than testing.  For example, we will build models with which our proposed customers can interact to help refine the feature content and performance. We can build prototype parts and provide these to the customer as a means for evaluation.  This evaluation will provide us with insight to customer use that will then become requirements in the product specification.  This evaluation will either mimic or be the actual proposed use of the product. This will be scenario based (analogous to live fire exercises) and will help set the requirements if early enough in the development cycle.