Verification and Validation

Ignite AIoT: Verification & Validation

Verification and validation (V&V) are important elements of a quality management system (QMS), implemented to ensure that the product meets the requirements and specifications. Verification typically addresses the question "Am I building the product right?", while validation is addressing the question "Am I building the right product?".

V&V for AIoT-based products has to take the specifics of AI and IoT into consideration, which is why Ignite AIoT is focusing on V&V, assuming that most organizations have overarching QM Systems which can be adapted to fit the needs of an AIoT-specific V&V approach.

Quality Assurance for AIoT

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is a widely established practice for monitoring the software engineering processes to ensure the quality of software. SQA typically covers the entire software development process, including requirements management, software design, coding, code quality, source code control, software configuration management, testing, as well as release and rollout management. Verficication & Validation is an important subset of SQA. SQA again is an element of Software Quality Management (SQM), which includes Quality Assurance, Quality Planning, and Quality Control. In this part of the Ignite AIoT Framework the focus is on Verfication and Validation, since this has many aspects which are highly specific to AIoT. Some other aspects of SQA/SQM have also been addressed as part of the AIoT DevOps discussion.

The challenge for any AIoT product is now that it needs to combine the well well established concepts of software quality assurance with the less well established concepts of QA for embedded hardware and software, as well as Artificial Intelligence - creating an integrated QA concept for AIoT. The V-Model - as outlined in the following - provides a good foundation for this.

Foundation: V-Model

The V-model is a systems development lifecycle which has verification and validation "built in". It is often used for development of mission critical systems, e.g. in automotive, aviation, energy and military applications. It also tends to be used in hardware-centric domains. The V-model - not surprisingly - is using a v-shaped visual representation, where the left side of the "V" represents the decomposition of requirements, as well as the creation of system specifications ("definition and decomposition"). The right side of the "V" represents the integration and testing of components. Moving up on the right side, testing usually starts with the basic verification (e.g. unit tests, then integration tests), followed by validation (e.g. user acceptance tests).

V&V for AI

V&V for IoT

V&V for AIoT

Agile V-Model for AIoT

Agile V-Model & SOP