Verification, validation and the achievement of quality: a holistic approach

Software engineering has made a significant contribution in two areas: structured testing techniques and the development of safety critical systems. The need to certify correctness of complex safety critical systems has focused attention on the basic techniques used in verification and validation of all systems, and progress in the definition of quality attributes for software now makes a disciplined and structured approach to the development of safety critical real time systems a practical possibility. Taken with steadily improving requirements analysis and system design techniques, a structured approach to verification and validation offers a holistic development method. This paper explores how the basic techniques of verification and validation can be applied within a structured lifecycle, and identifies how a quality framework can be overlaid on this lifecycle to make the achievement of safety criticality a special case of meeting the requirements for a system with a quantified quality profile