Essential book for user acceptance testing & contract mgt. Verification and validation are two important, if often misunderstood, aspects of delivering the big three: Reliability, Availability and Support. One of the reasons for this is technology has outstripped methods, which is what this book rectifies. V&V is not pre-production testing where the goal is to break the application or product, but is a functional qualification test (also known as user acceptance test or product test), where the goal is to ensure that what you have meets requirement specifications. Specifically, verification answers "did we build the right thing?" and validations answers "did we build it right?"
It's one thing to perform V&V for products and monolithic applications and quite another to apply these techniques to more complex systems. This book updates the V&V body of knowledge by showing how to perform V&V in objected-oriented and distributed environments, with an emphasis on specific system types such as data warehouses, inter- and internet systems, etc.
The authors start with a description of processes, models and standards that give you a foundation for incorporating V&V, and then discuss tools and methodologies, documentation and metrics. I especially liked the metrics provided, which will allow you to effectively and accurately measure your V&V process.
Another strong point about this book is that it addresses objected-oriented methods, which are difficult to verify and validate. Here is a real life example why: a global 50 company bought into a directory-enabled security scheme as the basis for their enterprise security. Such schemes are object-oriented and complex. At no point did the company verify or validate what they were buying into, either as a concept of the component products. Worse, the consulting company that "sold" it did not have any design proofs which could be verified and validated, nor did the consulting company or the global 50 company develop any structured acceptance testing. Net result: there is a large company that is betting the security of its internal and external applications on an unverified and unvalidated security scheme. The information in this book would have given both parties a structured approach with which to ensure that what looks good on paper actually works when you implement the design, especially with products that bring with them their own set of flaws. I cited this true story to underscore the value of V&V and to show how often it is not used for mission-critical systems.
The coverage of complex system types and development approaches in this book is must reading by anyone in QA, especially if QA is only performing pre-production testing. V&V is a necessary stage in the development (or procurement) process to ensure that what is eventually going into production conforms to what was specified. If your organization does not perform V&V then this book is all the more important, and will give you the processes and approaches to integrate it into your QA organization. If you are a QA practitioner who is currently performing V&V this book will provide techniques and approaches that will help you meet the growing challenges of verifying and validating increasingly complex systems. Finally, if you are a vendor manager for outsourced application development or application services that are provided from an ASP this book with give you a complete approach to verifying and validating the product or services for which you are contracting.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
