17 Nov Critical Need : No Funds
It was many years ago that an important project would hire an independent contractor to provide a full range of verification and validation (V&V) services. These services might begin with an assessment of the requirements prior to the issuance of a request for proposal for development of a system or software application and continue until the end of the project. In those days managers had adequate funds to include an independent V&V contractor in the overall project manager.
Now it is very different. Projects are being executed with limited funds. Independent V&V is seen as an expense rather than as a cost mitigation. This, in spite of the research showing that for every dollar spent on independent V&V there is at least an 85% return on investment (ROI) and often as much as a 284% return. Even critical projects may find themselves in the precarious position of not finding important errors or missing functionality until final testing. When this happens the cost of fixing the error is more than 100 times the cost of fixing it in the phase in which it occurred.
But limited budgets do not require foregoing independent V&V. They merely require the judicious use of available funds. The IV&V Group® has created its Critical Document Assessment Services and Critical Process Assessment Services just to fill this need. Because we recognize that a significant number of system and software defects result from insufficient requirements the IV&V Group® is now able to expand its services to include its Critical Requirements Elication Process.
All of our services come with our guarantee that your project will fulfill good engineering practices.