Fourth International Workshop on IV&V Held at West Virginia University

The Fourth Annual International Workshop on Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) of Software was held at West Virginia University’s Erikson Alumni Center in Morgantown, W.Va. September 11-13, 2012. Offering an understanding of the challenges that V&V organizations face assuring that system software operates safely and reliably, the event is designed to generate solutions by including over 50 presentations and demonstrations. Presenters and attendees represented NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation Program, IV&V, Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), as well as the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Brazilian Space Research Institutes.

The timing of this year’s workshop also coincided with the one year anniversary of the naming of the Jon McBride Software Testing and Research Lab by NASA. Known as JSTAR, the lab’s namesake, West Virginia astronaut Jon McBride, along with his colleague, astronaut Ken Cameron, spoke to the audience regarding their experiences working for NASA and shared insight and guidance for the JSTAR team.

This year’s keynote speaker was Dr. Roger Fujii. Dr. Fujii is known as the ‘father’ of the discipline of independent verification and validation. A three-time recipient of the IEEE Computer Society “Outstanding Achievement Award” for adoption of IEEE Standard for Software Verification and Validation, which is one of the key standards used to support the IV&V Program mission on behalf of NASA. Dr. Fujii was impressed with the breadth and depth of the information presented and expressed his hopes that the IV&V Workshop would continue to grow even beyond the audience of nearly 200 software engineers. “Beyond the technology discussions, the value of this meeting is heightened by the opportunity to have meaningful conversations about the manner in which strong, collaborative relationships between the IV&V engineers and their customers are successfully built. After all, the engineer’s task is to find what may not be functioning properly in the software. Telling someone the ‘bad news is…but the good news is we’ve identified the bad news’ is a delicate effort that must result in the success of critical and expensive missions.”

Participating and serving as sponsors were representatives from WVU, TASC Inc., SAIC Inc., MPL Corporation, KeyLogic, Allegheny Science and Technology, TMC2 Technologies, Mountain State Information Systems Inc., and the Center for Excellence and Software Traceability.