Experimental Validation of Microwave Software

While the last decade has seen an explosion of microwave software, experimental validation efforts have seen little effort. As a result, most published validation efforts are, justifyably, viewed with skepticism. Thus, when an analysis is to be validated, it must be validated again and again for, and by, each group of users, often at considerable expense. This paper describes areas for improvement of validation techniques, with examples drawn from current literature. The ultimate objective in the field of experimental validation is to evaluate a test suite with such a high confidence level, that multiple validations no longer need be performed by each user.