Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This is yet another fundamental to providing systems that delight users. Have we validated that we verified before vacation? Or is it the other way around?

There was a time when verification and validation were so commonly used that we called it “V&V.” Then we wanted independent persons to perform V&V so we called it “IV&V.” Folks like to shorten that to “four and five” as the were reading the Roman numerals.

What was all the fuss about? One way we untangled all these Vees was:

• Verification: did we build the system right?
• Validation: did we build the right system?

Nowadays, we pipeline-ly DevSecOps agilely or something like that. Still, V&V is important.

Remember that old drawing about the tire swing and all its variations and what the customer really wanted? Here is one rendition of it. Providing a tire swing instead of a triple-deck something-or-other is an example of validation. The customer wanted a tire swing. Did we provide a tire swing?

Suppose we provide a tire swing, but when a kid sits in the tire, the branch of the tree breaks. ooops, we didn’t verify the specified specification that the system needed to hold a 50-pound kid. Can the 50-pound kid fit in the tire or did we provide a tire that was too small? That is another example of not verifying that we met a specification.

Silly example? Maybe, but over the decades I saw plenty of silly examples of systems delivered to users that just plain didn’t work. Worse, I’ve seen plenty of systems where the user took one look and walked out of the room.

Build the right system and build it right. Back to basics. We can do better.