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likely to receive the level of attention that they do in mission-critical or life-critical
industries. An integrated software solution for a validation and verification procedure,
therefore, can provide utility for systems of any size or scale.
The software development process encounters various changes in requirements
and specifications. These changes could be a result of the customer who requires
the software application, the developer, or any other person involved in the software
development process. Design verification and validation is there to reduce the effects
of continually having to keep changing the requirements and specifications in the
software development process, to increase the performance, and to achieve software
quality and improvement. Software verification and validation (V&V) is one of the
important processes during the software development cycle. No software application
should be released before passing this process. Design verification is to ensure that
the software has implemented the system correctly, whereas design validation is to
ensure that the software has been built according to the customer requirements.
Software testing strategy is another goal of this chapter. Pressman (1997) defined
software testing as a process of exercising a program with the specific intent of finding
errors prior to delivery to the end user. Testing is the software development process
to ensure the quality and performance by uncovering the errors and find relative
solutions; also, testing plays an important role before releasing the application in the
software deployment phase.
The problem of using a certain verification method exists with most software or
system engineers because of the many verification methods available with specific
software environment needed. For that reason, we will be discussing three types
of verification methods, which are: the hybrid verification method, basic functional
verification method, and verification method using Petri Net. We also will be dis-
cussing several types of testing strategies, which are: test data generation testing,
traditional manual testing, proof of correctness. Finally, we will be presenting some
V&V standards with their domain of use.
19.2
THE STATE OF V&V TOOLS FOR SOFTWARE DFSS PROCESS
A development process provides a developer (individual, group, or enterprise)
with some degree of traceability and repeatability. There are several useful pro-
cess paradigms commonly used, including the waterfall model of which the V de-
sign paradigm is a derivative process (for more on software process methods, see
Chapter 2). The V development process depicts a modifiable paradigm in which the
design process flows down one branch of the V from a high level (abstract) to a low
level (detailed) and up the opposing branch of the V to a high level, with each suc-
cessive level or phase relying on the accumulated framework of the previous phase
for its developmental foundation.
Figure 19.1 depicts a V model software development process that has been mod-
ified to include concurrent test design phases that are derived from the fundamental
stages of the design process. A key feature of Figure 19.1 is that test designs are linked
to phases in both the design arm (the left-most process from a high level to a low
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