Lessons learned in building an environment for the independent verification and validation of a large Ada system

Independent verification and Validation (IV&V) is a set of formal activities performed by someone other than the developer to help build quality and reliability into the system. Most of IV&V time is consumed by design and code analyses, which account for about 70% of the discrepancies reported by IV&V. Both activities are primarily manual tasks, aided by loosely coupled set of tools. Manual tasks are time-consuming and error-prone. Additionally, loosely coupled tools are not sufficient for analyzing a large system. Therefore, IV&V needs better technology. When dealing with complex software, a comprehensive environment with a set of integrated tools is needed. This paper discusses characteristics of an Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE) suitable for IV&V of a software intensive Ada system, customization of the environment for IV&V needs, and lessons learned