Argumentation Tree: A New Player in your Diagrams

The aim of argumentation tree diagram is to organize and visualize, in a synthetic way, all key elements proving the validity of a product’s property. The argumentation tree does not represent the process, but gives the rational behind all Verification & Validation (V&V) documents. In fact, it lists and organizes necessary evidence in a development life cycle. But the validity of the final assessment requires the validation and the identification of the evidence of each intermediate step. So, in this article, we introduce a generic argumentation pattern and its derivations whose support a rational organization of all V&V evidence at each step. This pattern stems from legal science and argumentation theory legacies, and it is the basic building block for the argumentation tree construction. MOTS-CLÉS : patron d’argumentation, vérification et validation, ingénierie des exigences.