Independent Verification and Validation (IV & V)

How can you be sure that your mission-critical initiative is going to arrive on-time and with the promised quality and stability? Coveros consultants can establish an IV&V function in your organization, and let you focus on other issues.

Organizations institute an Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) program to ensure that software quality is built into software throughout the entire development process. The value of an IV&V program lies in its ability to provide an objective, unbiased audit and assessment of the organization’s delivery capabilities and the quality of the artifacts it produces. This is especially important for those organizations that rely heavily on external vendors for delivery of their software needs.

Coveros consultants have a deep history of providing IV&V services to some of the nation’s largest and highest profile organizations. Our teams have helped commercial- and public-sector entities ensure that the initiative outcomes and work products accurately meet the original needs and specifications identified by stakeholders. Our teams have the skills to provide continual audit during the course of an initiative to validate that progress is being made in accordance to the stated plan.

We investigate the performance and risks based on standards and best practices in the industry. In order to ensure that we verify and validate, we first seek to understand or potentially refine or build the appropriate requirements for the system as well as establish or refine the appropriate practices and processes to ensure we maximize the utilization of an outsourced provider or team that is responsible for systems development. These practices and processes can range from requirements elicitation and management, change management, quality management, and systems deployment. If approached correctly, IV&V is a reliable and trusted way to ensure that the system is being developed as per requirements, the system is reliable, and built with sound engineering practices. This allows the team to maximize their utilization and productivity, and ensures that the costs of the outsourcer or development team are minimized.

Each Coveros IV&V engagement begins with an assessment of the current system or product life cycle under which the solution will be built. This includes a review of various project artifacts such as the project vision, project plans, business cases, functional, technical and security requirements documents, test plans, architecture documents, and deployment plan. Once consultants are up to speed with the target process, the team conducts interviews with various project sponsors, stakeholders, and key members of the project team. During the engagement we will refine our understanding, validate our findings, and focus on identifying improvements and solutions to increase project success, minimize risks, and project costs. We would provide any missing or updated project artifact and assist in refining, repairing, or building components of the system or product life cycle.

Each of our consultants has an extensive background in delivering secure, custom software. This experience, coupled with an intimate understanding of IV&V domain, allows us to provide a unique level of support, tailored to fit the particular customer need. Some examples of IV&V programs that Coveros can implement for your organization include:

• Comprehensive IV&V Audits - Coveros can provide oversight and audit from conception through delivery and deployment of your large-scale, mission-critical software project. We can help identify and mitigate risk throughout the development lifecycle, and provide the assurance that the end productwas been built according to identified requirements (Verification) and serves the needs of the users (Validation).
• Development Audits - A cost effective alternative to the comprehensive IV&V model is the institution of a program for regular development audits. These will help minimizing the risks inherent in delivering large complex applications and can be customized to focus on the areas of greatest concern to the organization. Examples include, test coverage, maintainability, documentation, performance and architectural.
• Test Validation - Oftentimes, a customers on critical systems require a third-party to validate the accurate detection and elimination of defects by their QA teams. Coveros can help validate your testing effort, and serve as an independent check and balance to your internal or outsourced quality assurance team.
• Risk Management - Resource pressure always pushes the IT organization to do more with less. This often causes teams to cut corners in an effort to gain market expediency. Beyond simply ensuring that the teams are following the defined development process and delivering what has been requested, Coveros can help organizations build a Risk Management process that will help invest time & resources wisely and minimize the risk of mistakes.