GreenDart Inc. Team Blog

Requirements Verification & Validation

During the requirements phase the developer generates program requirements needed to support development. The developer also traces these requirements to their parent Customer system requirements. Verification & Validation assesses developer artifacts generated during this phase. The V&V team may analyze the Customer/developer project documents, requirements, traceability data, the Software/System Requirements Specifications, the Interface Requirements Specifications, and Interface Control Documents for interfacing to external and internal systems.

V&V of the developer's requirements ensures that the design phase is working from a mature base of requirements and satisfies the users' needs. Furthermore, these tasks also ensure that the requirements are testable and traceable.

If developers define their test approach, testing plans and test data during the requirements phase, then the developer's test planning effort is also reviewed by the IV&V team during the requirements phase. 

Interestingly, developer errors found in this phase of the effort by V&V have the greatest positive impact on total system development costs. So, requirements V&V is a significantly critical step in the overall V&V process and has the potential to deliver the best return on the V&V investment.

INTRO

Verification and Validation (V&V) drives the developmental process for introducing the latest product. GreenDart understands efficiently applying V&V to assess the correct requirements, design, code, and test for an upcoming product is critical to successfully deploying new capabilities. Ensuring the product’s success is a factor of quality and capability assessments. Successful V&V employs V&V tools to optimize the V&V effort. Assessment tools are utilized throughout all development stages and are capable of supporting V&V efforts by providing co-verification, sim-modeling, software debugging, testing, code analysis, and test-verification. 

APPROACH

Applying our V&V assessment tools library allows GreenDart to be versatile in its approach to reaching an optimal solution. GreenDart selects the appropriate V&V assessment tools for the different phases of development based on the unique assessment requirements of the program. In a system’s development cycle, its design can be divided into different stages of experimentation and refinement. For earlier stages of development, co-verification and sim-modeling tools and practices allows GreenDart to perform early design assessment and analyze failure effects on virtual prototypes. Subsequently, proper code analysis and software debugging tools are applied to provide diagnostics and generate actionable results for the latter phases of the development cycle. This enables GreenDart to identify system issues and to enforce compliance with industry standards. Furthermore, the importance of valid testing and test-verification is applied, which includes AI technology and unique visual test modeling mechanisms for faster test-creation and execution, while cost-efficiently analyzing any application or data.

BENEFITS

 Reducing Software Cost Through Verification and Validation

Many programs risk cost growth and schedule delays because of software development issues. Collecting, tracking and containing software issues/defects in the development phase where they occur is an excellent cost-control management practice. Programs surveyed indicated that an average of 31 percent of defects corrected were detected after the development phase in which they were inserted. Capturing software defects in phase is critical because detecting defects out of phase results in expensive program rework. The best mechanism for capturing defects in-phase, and thereby reducing software development cost is Verification and Validation (V&V). 

 V&V is an engineering technical discipline using proven techniques to detect defects in software and/or hardware and avoid risks in developmental programs. Independent V&V (IV&V) is V&V performed by an independent authority, which is managerially,  technically, and financially independent from the product developer. IV&V is the unbiased process of assessing system development performance against key technical, programmatic, and financial objectives ensuring the user needs are satisfied. Proper and most efficient V&V starts on or before the beginning of the product developer’s requirements phase. The purpose of  V&V is to help a product developer build quality into the product throughout its life-cycle phases: Requirements, Design, Development, Test, and post-delivery Sustainment. Additionally, a good V&V program benefits from the use of V&V Tools and the application of advanced V&V processes such as GreenDart’s Criticality Analysis and Risk Assessment (CARA). Finally, the V&V agent may also be responsible for Independent Testing of the pre-deployed system. We cover all these V&V efforts in our complete V&V discussion.

V&V includes V&V planning and re-planning as system development evolves. It includes the review of developers’ requirements definition, design analysis, unit code and testing, test planning and test results assessment, and conduct of independent V&V testing where appropriate.

IV&V plans are based on government direction and funding, the developer’s System Development Plan, the developers’ processes, and other development planning data.

OVERVIEW

Given the current COVID-19 environment and the pressure that puts on the mobility of test teams to complete Operational Test and Evaluation requirements on key programs, much more emphasis is now placed on integrating various aspects of remote testing into test event planning, execution and reporting. The three main test planning, execution and reporting efforts augmented by a more aggressive remote testing requirement are: pre-event information capture from non-traditional operational test sources; operational observation; event execution data collection and in-process event early assessments coordination.

PRE-EVENT DATA/INFORMATION/CAPABILITY CAPTURE

Techniques: Developmental test results analysis; customer, contractor, user community coordination for suitable data sources.

Tools: Developer/community test environments.

The science of analyzing raw data in order to make insightful conclusions about information; this is Data Analytics. A vast array of techniques and processes innately performed by data analysts have been automated into algorithms that digest and distill raw data into meaningful responses. This evaluation of data analysis is a critical foundation in a world dominated by the availability and manipulation of data.  Each day we utilize our smartphones, smart TV’s, smart cars, and smart home devices in the Internet of Things. In our everyday utilization we provide these devices with an immense amount of data on us as people and our market behaviors. We create patterns and natural rule sets that these systems process and ultimately and iteratively learn from. The world of data analytics is an ever-evolving space for awaiting the perfect answer to the questions yet asked.

APPROACH

GreenDart operates at the forefront of industry by maximizing involvement in the world of data analytics.  GreenDart is instrumental in advancing a law enforcement led program of creating a single data set of unified law enforcement data, giving analysts a single platform to develop and train more effective algorithms. This platform ingests multiple sources and allow analysts to create patterns and rule sets to identify outliers for further inspection. Once initial digestion is complete, the computer learns new patterns based on these initial algorithms, optimally resulting in predictive identification and rule tailoring.  GreenDart is essential in addressing the gaps between requirements and reaching the solution expected by the customer.  Great emphasis is put on the ability of the computer to learn new patterns with minimal input from the analyst.