Software Validation and Verification A. Concepts and Definitions Software Verification and Validation (V&V) is the process of ensuring that software being developed or changed will satisfy functional and other requirements (validation) and each step in the process of building the software yields the right products (verification). The differences between verification and validation are unimportant except to the theorist; practitioners use the term V&V to refer to all of the activities that are aimed at making sure the software will function as required. V&V is intended to be a systematic and technical evaluation of software and associated products of the development and maintenance processes. Reviews and tests are done at the end of each phase of the development process to ensure software requirements are complete and testable and that design, code, documentation, and data satisfy those requirements. B. Activities The two major V&V activities are reviews, including inspections and walkthroughs, and testing. 1. Reviews, Inspections, and Walkthroughs Reviews are conducted during and at the end of each phase of the life cycle to determine whether established requirements, design concepts, and specifications have been met. Reviews consist of the presentation of material to a review board or panel. Reviews are most effective when conducted by personnel who have not been directly involved in the development of the software being reviewed. Informal reviews are conducted on an as-needed basis. The developer chooses a review panel and provides and/or presents the material to be reviewed. The material may be as informal as a computer listing or hand-written documentation. Formal reviews are conducted at the end of each life cycle phase. The acquirer of the software appoints the formal review panel or board, who may make or affect a go/no-go decision to proceed to the next step of the life cycle. Formal reviews include the Software Requirements Review, the Software Preliminary Design Review, the Software Critical Design Review, and the Software Test Readiness Review. An inspection or walkthrough is a detailed examination of a product on a step-by-step or line-of-code by line-of-code basis. The purpose of conducting inspections and walkthroughs is to find errors. The group that does an inspection or walkthrough is composed of peers from development, test, and quality assurance. 2. Testing Testing is the operation of the software with real or simulated inputs to demonstrate that a product satisfies its requirements and, if it does not, to identify the specific differences between expected and actual results. There are varied levels of software tests, ranging from unit or element testing through integration testing and performance testing, up to software system and acceptance tests. a. Informal Testing Informal tests are done by the developer to measure the
Some of the testing at the unit level would be White Box testing. Making sure that different parts of processes or objects were executing properly during state transitions. It would look at the accuracy of logical operations for financial transactions and functions such as keeping double booking of appointment times from occurring.
Processes for this phase will include, implementing improvements that were identified in the check phase
"My body is on fire" exclaimed Oklahoma inmate Charles Warner, 47, at his January execution of this year as the wrong drug cocktail was used to execute him, according to an autopsy report released yesterday (10/8/15) by the Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
In this examination, the information that the tester gather is more important than the tool he/she used (El
...arations needed during implementation of the project while the final phase is meant for overall evaluation.
This essay describes the issues in connection to software quality, to uncover the main reasons of data and information which needs quality, and to propose the suitable plan to address the issues. Absence of techniques and management of systems and software inside the hospital surroundings brings about low quality of administration and makes the objective of patient wellbeing more troublesome. Through my reading of the research papers I have recognized software process requirements for a hospital quality plan and I have proposed a few rules dependent upon existing health care standards, quality.
Information technology is growing rapidly. Along with the rapid advancements, a large number of software security violations are taking place, which are causing an overwhelming impact on the organizations and the individuals. In the past few years many methods have been proposed to identify and prevent weaknesses in software programs. “Fuzzing was first proposed by Miller et.al in the year 1990 to detect software vulnerabilities” (Zhang, Liu, Lei, Kung, Csallner, Nystrom & Wang, 2012, p.102). In the process of detecting vulnerabilities the program inputs are changed to form different inputs to identify the various possible paths present in the program. The run time behavior of the programs are monitored on the different inputs to detect exceptions. If any exceptions are found then it can be said that weaknesses are present in the program and the software program is vulnerable.
While developing a software many complex activities are required which in turn have dependencies along them. Large software projects require the involvement of programmers, documentation specialists, program managers, architects, database analysts, system analysts, , and trainers and last but not the least testers. Along with their independent responsibilities these persons are also responsible to maintain and keep a check on the software system quality as well.
Process evaluation- Focuses on procedures required to implement a program. Process evaluation offer detailed accounts and descriptions of programs and program implementations. Many factors include things like mission/goals of the program, the level and quality of program staff, the funding and other resources of the program, and obstacles that may be faced. A major limitation of process evaluations is often
Monitoring, Review and Revision of Plan - ensures that it remains current. In addition, the monitoring process is backed up by full managerial accountability for the success of the plan.
As more companies that are leading technology are transforming from the traditional waterfall development model to an Agile software methodology, requirements engineering provides a process for software engineers to understand the problems they need to solve (Martin, Newkirk, & Koss, 2014). It is of key importance to understand the customer 's wants and needs before beginning designing or building the computer-based solution, as developing a solution that ignores the customer’s needs provides value to none of the parties involved. Thus, the intent of requirements engineering is to produce a written understanding of the customer 's problem (Pressman, 2010). Work products that are available to communicate this understanding include user scenarios, function and feature lists, analysis models, and specifications. This paper provides an evaluation of requirement patterns, an assessment of problem solving techniques most effective, a descriptive explanation of the patterns that includes a visual taxonomy, and an explanation of how the patterns identified are related.
Study of Literature for related work is the most important step in software development process. Before designing and developing the tool it is necessary to determine the time factor, the economy and company strength. Considering the importance of software reliability in software engineering, its prediction becomes a very fundamental issue. Machine learning and soft computing techniques have been leading the statistical techniques in last two decades as far as their applications to software engineering are concerned. The most recent research work carried out for predicting software reliability was Hybrid intelligent systems for predicting software reliability [1] Mohanty et al. (2013). The author has employed recurring architecture for Genetic Programming and Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) and also collaborative models involving GP, GMDH as constituents and GP, GMDH, BPNN and Average as arbitrators in predicting software reliability. Another state-of-the-art review [2] Mohanty et al. (2010) validates the affirmation. The techniques that were employed by the authors were machin...
Software quality is overused and vague in software engineering. It comprises all stakeholder needs and perspectives connecting to the software to be delivered. I.e., the degree to which software meets agreed functional and non-functional requirements such as performance, consistency, usability, reliability among others which are subjective to different users. To overcome this ambiguity, software quality measurement techniques expressed in terms of metrics are used. This
Software development follows a specific life cycle that starts with designing a solution to a problem and implementing it. Software testing is part of this software life cycle that involves verifying if each unit implemented meets the specifications of the design. Even with careful testing of hundreds or thousands of variables and code statements, users of software find bugs. “Software testing is arguably the least understood part of the development process” and is also a “time-consuming process that requires technical sophistication and proper planning” (Whittaker 71) It is important to comprehend this concept by understanding the different characteristics and aspects of software testing, and then to examine the techniques, procedures and tools used to apply this concept. This will enable the user to realize the problems faced by software testers and the importance of software testing.