Practicing What is Preached: 80-20 Rules for Strategic IV&V Assessment

The notion of using an 80-20 rule to drive decision making has been around for decades. Yet the details of how to turn this general principle into something operational have remained elusive. In reality, no-one has created concrete rules for how to realize an 80-20 rule as a business strategy. In this paper we show how to use empirical project data to create provably optimal strategic risk reduction strategies. While the domain of our example is in IV&V, this technique is usable in general, and may be applied to any software engineering activity where there are multiple goals to be met, multiple techniques that can partially meet those goals, and empirical data of the effectiveness of each technique in isolation. We illustrate this technique using real data from an aerospace ground tracking system.