The Role of Verification and Validation in System Development Life Cycle

Abstract

Software is build to satisfy needs of specific client or business. In today's competitive world of software, software developers have to deliver quality product on time. Quality of software is very essential in software development and for this developer has to verify that the software is functioning properly and validate the product as per client requirement. Importance of Verification and Validation in software development is to maintain software quality. Verification and Validation techniques are applied to all phases of System Development Life Cycle. This paper presents verification and validation activities in the software development process, how quality of software can be improve, verification and validation objective and lifecycle usage. Keyword-System Development Life Cycle, Software Quality, Validation, Verification. I. Introduction In the age of the Internet, where software is more mission-critical than ever, it's no longer enough for your development projects to succeed some of the time. You need to deliver excellent software quality, consistently and do it faster than ever. Software Quality is achieved through the application of development techniques and the use of Verification and Validation (V&V) procedures through the development process. The goal of V&V of software is that we need to check if developed software meets the clients need & specification. V&V is a collection of analysis and testing activities across full life cycle and complements the efforts of other quality-engineering functions. V&V comprehensively analyzes and tests software to determine that it performs its intended functions correctly, to ensure that it performs no unintended functions, and to measure its quality and reliability. V&V is a system-engineering discipline to evaluate software in a system context. Like systems engineering, it uses structured approach to analyzes and test the software against all system functions and against hardware, user and other software interfaces (1). V&V are two branches of software testing. They are complementary to each other and not substitutes of each other. Proper V&V together can ensure the quality of software as well as quality of processes used for developing and testing software which will finally help in achieving business objectives. Only proper verification without validation and vice versa cannot ensure a good software product. Rather, it needs combination of both.