11 Jul The Secret Side of IV&V

You know that your client does not want to spend money for Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) or the client believes IV&V is not warranted.  Maybe there are things you are already doing that might fall under the umbrella of V&V.  These same things might well fall under your current tasking whether it is quality assurance or even test management.

For example, if you are responsible for testing new or modified software there are a number of things you can do that will definitely enhance your test sets.  You might:

• Verify that the underlying requirements that form the basis of your test sets are complete, correct, unambiguous and testable.
• Verify that the requirements are evidenced in the design.
• Verify that the design does not reflect unauthorized requirements.
• Validate that the user manual reflects the software that should-be based on the approved requirements.

Or perhaps you are responsible for quality assurance there are things you can do that will add additional value to both the product and the processes.  These include:

• Evaluate product for conformance to established requirements.
• Evaluate product for acceptability
• Evaluate life cycle processes and plans for conformance
• Evaluate the configuration management process for correctness and conformance.
• Coordinate with related software development processes.

Whether your project uses one of the Agile methodologies, iterative development or even waterfall the completion of these tasks are critical to the satisfactory accomplishment of the development effort.

While executing these tasks you need to pretend that you are not affiliated with the organization or the development effort.  You need to think about these tasks as if you were an outside evaluater.   This is how your work actually becomes secret IV&V.

On the other hand, if you are actively seeking an IV&V guru we can provide one for you. Just contact us.