Catalog
method#Quality Assurance#Software Engineering#Reliability

Verification and Validation

A structured assessment process ensuring a system conforms to specifications (verification) and meets stakeholder needs (validation). It comprises tests, inspections and acceptance activities.

Verification and Validation (V&V) is a structured assessment process ensuring a system meets its specifications (verification) and fulfils stakeholder needs (validation).
Established
Medium

Classification

  • Medium
  • Technical
  • Architectural
  • Intermediate

Technical context

CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Jenkins, GitHub Actions)Test management tools (e.g. TestRail, Zephyr)Issue tracker and requirements management (e.g. Jira)

Principles & goals

Separation of verification and validationEarly and iterative testingTraceable documentation of results
Build
Enterprise, Domain, Team

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Incorrect requirement assumptions lead to incomplete validation
  • Insufficient test coverage leads to undetected defects
  • High effort delays releases and increases costs
  • Risk-based test prioritization
  • Automate regression tests early
  • Maintain full traceability between requirements and tests

I/O & resources

  • Requirement documents and acceptance criteria
  • Test environments and test data
  • Builds, artifacts and integration plans
  • Test reports and acceptance documents
  • List of identified risks and recommendations
  • Updated requirements and bug tracker entries

Description

Verification and Validation (V&V) is a structured assessment process ensuring a system meets its specifications (verification) and fulfils stakeholder needs (validation). The method combines inspection activities, test plans and acceptance criteria to systematically uncover defects, assumptions and requirement gaps and to document their resolution.

✔

  • Reduces production defects and recall risk
  • Improves stakeholder satisfaction through needs-oriented validation
  • Enables informed release and risk assessments

✖

  • Effort-intensive for complex system landscapes
  • Not all non-functional requirements can be fully automated
  • Dependency on realistic test environments and data

  • Test coverage

    Measure of percentage of tested requirements or code paths.

  • Post-release defect rate

    Number of defects found per release or operational unit.

  • Mean Time To Detect

    Average time until detection of a defect in operation.

V&V in a medical device

Formal verification of requirements and validation through clinical testing prior to market approval.

Automotive ECU integration test

Systematic integration checks and hardware-in-the-loop runs to validate in-vehicle environment.

Cloud service release validation

Perform end-to-end and chaos tests to validate resilience and SLAs before production rollout.

1

Define acceptance criteria and test objectives

2

Set up test environments and automation pipelines

3

Execute verification and validation cycles and track results

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Outdated or unmaintained test scripts
  • Missing automation of critical regression tests
  • Insufficient test environments that mirror production
Test environment gapsData availabilityCross-subsystem dependencies
  • Using V&V solely as a compliance checkbox without substantive depth
  • Outsourcing all testing to third parties without knowledge transfer
  • Static test cases not adapted to changing requirements
  • Unrealistic test data gives false sense of security
  • Ignoring non-functional requirements during validation
  • Missing traceability of test results
Test design and test automationDomain knowledge and requirements analysisTool skills for CI/CD and test execution
Requirement traceabilityTestability of componentsOperational observability and monitoring
  • • Limited test infrastructure
  • • Time pressure before releases
  • • Regulatory proof obligations