Confirming Deliverable Performance – Test Verification and Validation

System development typically concludes with a series of test events that culminate in the delivery of the desired capabilities. The test events start with the system element integration as pieces of the end-system are brought together. The corresponding test activity is called Integration Test. Once all the system elements are integrated, System Test is performed on the complete system. Finally, once all the System Test objectives are met then System Acceptance Test is performed to assure the final deliverable capability meets all customer requirements.

Correspondingly, there are Verification and Validation (V&V) activities that assure successful Integration, System, and Acceptance testing. These V&V activities follow a fairly similar activity of assessing test plans, procedures, and, once completed, test results against planned outcomes. This step is critical to assure the quality, completeness and accuracy of the developer’s test efforts.

INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM TEST V&V
During this phase, the developer integrates and tests the integrated system components which could include hardware components and reuse code.  Integration testing confirms functional requirements compliance after the software sub-elements are integrated and directs attention to internal software interfaces and external hardware and operator interfaces.  Subsequent system testing validates the entire program against system requirements and performance objectives.

V&V assesses the sufficiency and completeness of the developer's integration and system test program, identifying weaknesses, and focusing needed V&V test assessments accordingly.  Previous validation activities have prepared this phase for developer software integration and incremental system testing.

V&V also assesses changes to the following developer products:  system development and design documents, interface control documents, source code, software executables, test plans and procedures, test results and other products as described in the developer's Test Plan.  As the developer's integration and system testing proceed, the V&V team carefully monitors critical testing activities and validates any changes that are made to the code or documentation.

SYSTEM ACCEPTANCE TEST V&V
System acceptance testing validates that system requirements have been fully implemented.  The Acceptance Test Phase is typically performed with the software running on the target hardware.  System acceptance testing is done against the customer system documents and verifies that the fully integrated system meets all system level requirements and risk control measures.  One point of this testing is to discover mistakes of omission, i.e., system requirements which have not been correctly implemented.

V&V provides an assessment of the delivered system.  The assessment may include data from V&V independent testing.  V&V is conducted on updates during the system acceptance test phase.  During this phase, the V&V team reviews problems that are found, the fixes for these problems and the adequacy of the test plans to retest.

Author: Bedjanian