KC 7.3.2 - Verification Methods

a. In Process Reviews

Reviews are conducted during and at the end of each phase of the life cycle to determine
whether established requirements, design concepts, and specifications have been met.  Reviews
consist of the presentation of material to a review board or panel.  Reviews are most effective
when conducted by personnel who have not been directly involved in the development of the
software being reviewed.

Informal reviews are conducted on an as-needed basis.  The developer chooses a review panel
and provides and/or presents the material to be reviewed.  The material may be as informal as
a computer listing or hand-written documentation.

i. Walkthroughs.

A walkthrough is a detailed examination of a product on a step-by-step or line-of-code by
line-of-code basis.  The purpose of conducting walkthroughs is to find errors.   The group that
does an walkthrough is composed of peers from development, test, and quality assurance.

ii. Inspections.

Formal reviews (Inspection) are typically conducted at the end of each life cycle phase.  
The acquirer of the software appoints the formal review panel or board, who may make or
affect a go/no-go decision to proceed to the next step of the life cycle. Formal reviews include
the Software Requirements Review, the Software Preliminary Design Review, the Software
Critical Design Review, and the Software Test Readiness Review.

Specific to code inspection, The Code would be reviewed by a number of other
programmers from a different perspective, such as a user, tester, or a product
support person, thus help identify different bugs.Guidelines are adopted for
coding standards.

iii. Requirements Tracing.

Requirements traceability is defined as the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both a forward and backward direction (i.e., from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through periods of ongoing refinement and iteration in any of these phases).

For any given project, a key milestone (or step) is to determine and agree upon requirements traceability details. Initially, three important questions need to be answered before embarking on any particular requirements traceability approach:

1. What needs to be traceable?
2. What linkages need to be made?
3. How, when, and who should establish and maintain the resulting database?

Once the questions are answered, then selection of an approach can be made. One approach could be the structured use of general-purpose tools (e.g., hypertext editors, word processors, and spreadsheets) configured to support cross-referencing between documents. For large software development projects, an alternative approach could be the use of a dedicated workbench centered around a database management system providing tools for documenting, parsing, editing, decomposing, grouping, linking, organizing, partitioning, and managing requirements. Following paragraphs describes the features of each of the approaches.

General purpose tools

· readily available

· flexible

· good for small projects

Workbenches

· fine-grained forward, backward, horizontal, and vertical RT

· RT results may facilitate later development activities (i.e., testing)

· suitable for large projects

Regardless of the approach taken, requirements tracing requires a combination of models (i.e., representation forms), methods (i.e., step by step processes), and/or languages (i.e., semiformal and formal) that incorporate the above techniques.

b. Phase-End Reviews

A formal review held at the end of each project phase to gain consensus that the phase is complete.

The objectives of the review are:

• Verify that phase objectives have been met
• Verify phase exit criteria
• Evaluate phase performance in terms of:
  Has the schedule been met?
  Has the required scope been delivered?
  Do planned costs equal actual costs?
• Determine the effectiveness of software development processes used
• Identify process improvements

The required outcome from the review is to receive authorisation to continue to the next phase or close out the project if it is in its final phase.