SOFTWARE DESIGN VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION - Software Design for Six-Sigma: A Roadmap for Excellence - page 502

Customer Needs Production

Test methods and requirements

Product functions
and characteristics

Product validation

Lessons learned

Product
architecture and
interfaces

Subsystem and
system integration
and verification

Redesign

Lessons learned

System
simulations

Test methods
and requirements

Redesign

Physical
prototyping

System and
subsystem
defination

Lessons
learned

Virtual prototyping

Components and
parts design

Redesign

Manufacturing
process

Subsystem
simulations

Design
process
management

Supply
chain
design

Process
capability
data

Bill of
materials

Business
practices

Engineering
data

FIGURE 19.2 V process model Modified to Indicate the Potential for a Completely Unified
Process Approach. 2

commonly colored stages represent a known and/or proven process trace among
like-colored phases. For the red phases and chains of phases, software tools are not
available. The yellow phases represent emerging software tool developments. For the
green colored components, there may be one or more well-known or proven software
tools however these may not necessarily be “interoperable or are used inefficiently. 3
Figure 19.2 plainly indicates the lack of conjunctive applications to facilitate a uni-
fied process flow conjoining requirements and design to validation and verification
phases at all levels of development. Some design/development platforms such as
MATLAB/Simulink (The MathWorks, Inc., MA, USA) offer solutions that partially
bridge the gap. Some source integrity and requirements management tools provide
solutions that may involve complex configuration management or require process
users to learn additional program languages or syntaxes.

19.3 INTEGRATING DESIGN PROCESS WITH
VALIDATION/VERIFICATION PROCESS

Testing, debugging, verification, and validation are inarguably essential tasks of sys-
tem development, regardless of the process adopted. By extending the abilities of

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Model (software development).
3 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11049.html.