Software verification

From Free net encyclopedia

Software verification is a broad and complex discipline of software engineering whose goal is to assure that a software fully satisfies all the expected requirements.

There are two fundamental approaches to verification:

• Dynamic verification, also known as Test or Experimentation
• Static verification, also known as Analysis

Dynamic verification (Test, Experimentation)

Dynamic verification is performed during the execution of a software, and dynamically checks its behaviour; it is commonly known as Test phase. Depending on the scope of tests, we can categorize them in three families:

• Test in the small: a test that check a single function or class (Unit test)
• Test in the large: a test that check a group of classes, such as
  • Module test (a single module)
  • Integration test (more than one module)
  • System test (the entire system)
• Acceptance test: a formal test defined to check acceptance criteria for a software
  • Functional test
  • Non functional test (performance, stress test)

Software verification is often confused with software validation. The difference between 'verification and validation:

• Software verification asks the question, "Are we building the product right?"; that is, does the software conform to its specification.
• Software validation asks the question, "Are we building the right product?"; that is, is the software doing what the user really requires.

Static verification (Analysis)

Static verification is a process to check some requirements of a software doing a physical inspection of it. For example:

• Code conventions verification
• Bad practices detection
• Software metrics calculation
• Formal verification

References

• Carlo Ghezzi, Mehdi Jazayeri, Dino Mandrioli: Fundamentals of Software Engineering, Prentice Hall, ISBN 013099183X

See also

• Why: a software verification tool