A collaborative environment for independent verification and validation of software

The collaborative approach to product development is becoming increasingly recognized as a key to improve the productivity of the participating team members. However, in practice, its realization is hindered by the lack of computing environments to support collaborative work. The set of basic transactions needed in a collaborative setting consists of a variety of activities: look up, communicate, compute, decide, negotiate, and archive. We discuss a generic architecture for a collaborative environment. We discuss the application of the same generic architecture to the software domain: to develop an environment for independent verification and validation (IV&V) of software. The benefits of the collaborative approach are: early diagnosis of problems, improvement in efficiency and team performance, and consequently cost savings. This will be especially beneficial for IV&V of large software systems. We illustrate the collaborative environment using an example of a software that performs set operations on polygons