Let’s Not Forget Validation

As we are moving from a traditional software development process to a new development paradigm where the process it largely driven by tools and automation, new challenges for verification and validation (V&V) emerge. Productivity improvements will in this new paradigm be achieved through reduced emphasis on testing of implementations, increased reliance on automated analysis tools applied in the specification domain, verifiably correct generation of sourcecode, and verifiably correct compilation. The V&V effort will now be largely focused on assuring that the formal specifications are correct and that the tools are trustworthy so that we can rely on the results of the analysis and code generation without extensive additional testing of the resulting implementation. Traditionally, most research efforts have been devoted to the verification problem. In this position paper we point out the importance of validation and argue that if we fail to adequately address the validation problem, the impact of verifying code generation and compilation will be limited.