Understand the V&V Plan
You’ve reached an important milestone: you’ve defined your detailed specifications! Now’s the ideal time to start working with the testers to define your test strategy by building a verification and validation (V&V) plan.
A V&V plan is a sort of checklist for testing your project. Its purpose is to verify that everything works as planned and to validate that the outcome matches what was requested. It’s a guide to help ensure that nothing is forgotten during testing.
The V&V plan is designed for all stakeholders, including the project sponsor, project owners, IT project team, and clients. It’s created before the development phase to act as a guide for the developers and testers.
What’s the purpose of creating a V&V plan?
There are three main objectives for producing a V&V plan:
Demonstrate compliance: Do you want to ensure that the final product adheres to the detailed specifications you’ve produced? This is an essential step in ensuring that the final product meets the client’s needs and expectations.
Guarantee quality and performance: Do you want to ensure that the final product is of high quality and works correctly? This requires testing the delivered code very precisely to identify and correct any potential errors.
Facilitate communication and documentation: The V&V plan acts as a testing guide but also serves as a reference document for all stakeholders. It’s an essential communication tool that helps ensure that everyone is on the same wavelength.
How do I produce a V&V plan?
First of all, you need to identify which specifications need to be validated. Then, you need to define the methods, resources, and tools that you’ll be using to carry out this validation.
Here’s an example table that describes a specific piece of functionality, its corresponding validation method, the resources needed, and tools used.
Specification | Validation Method | Resources | Tools |
The rocket must be able to reach an altitude of 100 km | Test flight to the specified altitude and measure the resulting altitude | Aerospace engineers, flight equipment, and altitude measuring instruments | Flight simulation software, altitude sensors on the rocket |
In this example, the specification states that the rocket must be able to reach an altitude of 100 km. The validation method for this specification is a flight test where we measure the altitude reached by the rocket.
The resources needed for this test include aerospace engineers to carry out the test, flight equipment needed for the rocket, and instruments to measure the altitude.
The tools used could include flight simulation software to plan the test, as well as altitude sensors placed on the rocket to measure the altitude reached during the flight.
As project manager, am I responsible for producing the V&V plan?
It’s the testers who are responsible for ensuring that the testing aligns with the specifications. The developers’ role is to guarantee the software quality and performance. Your role as project manager is to facilitate communication and documentation between the stakeholders. We’ll see what this facilitation role involves.
Demonstrate Compliance
While the main responsibility for writing the tests in a V&V plan doesn’t lie with you, you still have a number of key responsibilities:
Understand V&V methods: The project manager must have an in-depth understanding of verification and validation methods. This involves coordinating training or briefing sessions for the whole project team (including the project manager), if necessary, to ensure that all team members have a comprehensive understanding of V&V processes.
Define the test strategy: The project manager plays a key role in working with the project sponsor to define the test strategy. The project manager facilitates communication between all relevant parties, ensuring that the expectations are clear and that the testing strategy is designed to meet these expectations.
Include elements from the business requirements: The project manager ensures that all relevant elements from the business requirements are taken into consideration in the V&V strategy. This will help guarantee that the final product meets all of the expectations set out in the business requirements.
Guarantee Quality and Performance
Let’s go into more detail on the actions needed to define a V&V plan that will guarantee system quality and performance.
List the Specifications Requiring Verification/Validation
The first step involves drawing up a detailed list of all the specifications that need to be verified and validated. For each specification:
Clearly identify what needs to be tested.
Determine how success will be measured.
Define clear and achievable objectives for each specification.
Identify the Resources, Tools, and Software for Testing
Next, you need to identify the resources, tools, and software required to complete the testing. This could include:
Staff needed to execute the testing.
Tools or equipment needed to execute the testing.
Software or services needed to execute, monitor, or analyze the testing.
Define the Evaluation Criteria for Each Specification
Once you’ve identified your resources, you need to define the evaluation criteria for each specification. These criteria must be measurable and relevant to the specification being evaluated. You might consider:
Performance or quality standards that the product must meet.
Specific criteria that the product must fulfill to be considered to have met the specification.
Timeframes within which to complete testing for each specification.
Define the Defect Management Procedure
Finally, you need to define a procedure for managing defects that arise during the testing process. This includes:
How defects will be identified and documented.
How corrections will be applied.
How defects and corrective actions will be communicated to all affected stakeholders.
How defect resolution will be tracked.
By applying these strategies, you can be sure that your V&V plan will be robust and well defined, with clear criteria for assessing system quality and performance, details of suitable resources for executing the tests, and a solid procedure for managing defects.
Facilitate Communication and Documentation
The final element of your role in creating the verification and validation (V&V) plan is optimizing communication and documentation.
This requires you to:
create a rigorous test plan.
define responsibilities.
design a robust verification process.
adopt an efficient communication approach with all stakeholders.
Here’s how you could approach each of these elements:
Plan Testing and Define Responsibilities
This is essential for providing an efficient and structured V&V process:
Organize a meeting with all stakeholders to discuss the test plan and determine who will be responsible for each aspect of the testing process.
Produce a detailed testing schedule, including deadlines for each testing phase.
Ensure that every team member understands their role in the testing process.
Design a Verification Process
Creating a rigorous verification process will help to ensure that the final product meets all of the specifications defined in the business requirements document:
Identify all test criteria based on the business requirements specifications.
Develop a list of detailed checks for each of the test criteria.
Ensure that every team member understands how to use the checklist to verify whether the product meets the specifications.
Document the Process and Communicate it to the Client
Once you’ve established the verification process, it’s important to document it and communicate it to the client. This can be done by providing regular updates to the client throughout the testing process.
Involve Testers
To ensure that your V&V process is effective, you also need to encourage testers to be actively involved in the process.
Get testers involved from the beginning of the test planning process so they can add their contributions and expertise.
Organize training sessions for testers so they’ll fully understand the test criteria and know how to use the checklists to verify that the results are as expected.
Provide ongoing support to testers throughout the testing process.
By implementing these strategies, you’ll be able to improve communication and documentation on the project, which will make the V&V process easier and help to ensure that the final product meets all of the specifications and requirements provided by the business.
Over to You!
Background
You’ve been given the task of setting up a verification and validation (V&V) plan to ensure that the software functions as expected and meets the client’s requirements.
Instructions
Your task is to complete a table containing a list of specifications. For each specification, you’ll need to determine the type of testing that would be most suitable. Types of testing include unit testing and integration testing.
List of specifications: You’ve been provided with a list of project specifications. These specifications might include particular functionality that the software must provide, performance standards that need to be met, and so on.
Determine the testing type: For each specification, you’ll need to determine the most appropriate type of testing. For example, a specification relating to an individual software function might require unit testing, while a specification relating to the overall software functionality might require integration testing.
Complete the table: For each specification, note the testing type in the table.
At the end of this exercise, you’ll have a table linking each specification to a specific testing type, which will make planning and executing your V&V plan much easier.
Let’s Recap
The verification and validation (V&V) plan is a pre-development checklist for testing the project and ensuring that it will meet the requirements.
The aim of the V&V plan is to facilitate communication and to ensure that the application meets the specifications and adheres to quality and performance standards.
Testers are the main contributors to the V&V plan. The role of the project manager is to understand the V&V process, define the test strategy, and ensure all elements from the business requirements are included.
Designing a V&V plan involves listing the specifications, identifying resources, defining the assessment criteria, and managing defects.
Good communication and documentation should cover planning for tests, assigning responsibilities, setting up the verification process, and involving testers.
After discussing the detailed specifications and the importance of testing the software development project, we’ll now explore another central element of the project manager’s role: steering the project.
But before that, I suggest you test your knowledge in the quiz that follows.
