Leveraging Risk Investment - Design V&V

The next stage of overall V&V effort is Design V&V. Once the initial V&V investment is made during the requirements development phase, that investment pays off during the design phase V&V effort. Specifically, the foundational V&V priorities identified in the requirements phase become design V&V decision drivers, leading to desired assessments of critical system capabilities.

System design transforms the developer's system requirements into discrete items that implement those requirements.  The outputs of the system design phase are used to support the detailed design activity.  Detailed design lays out the specific system units comprising each item including a unit's interfaces with other system units and each unit's internal structure, processes and data needs.

V&V is conducted during system design and detailed design phases.  Assessed developer products include:  System Requirements Specification, Interface Requirements Specification, System Design Document, Interface Design Document, System Test Plan, System Test Description (STD), and System Architecture Description (SAD).  V&V assesses these developer artifacts and those presented during program reviews.

Design phase V&V solidifies the preliminary and final design specifications, and performs risk and security evaluations.  Validating the design artifacts ensures that the coding and the unit testing which follow are secured by a sound design traceable to the driving requirements.

Developer errors found in the design phase of the effort by V&V have a significant impact on total system development costs. So, design V&V is a critical next step in the overall V&V process and has the potential to deliver excellent return on the V&V investment.

How GreenDart can help you: GreenDart is an author of the IEEE 1012 Verification and Validation standard and has significant experience successfully performing requirements V&V for mission critical systems development efforts. We have proven successful results from these efforts. Please contact us for more information.

Author: Bedjanian