V&V As a Way of Life

There's nothing like a good conference to remind you of the basics.

I recently attended IEEE VisWeek and participated in the panel "Verification in Visualization: Building a Common Culture". The panel was organized by Mike Kirby (Utah) and Claudio Silva (NYU Poly) with Robert Laramee (U. of Swansea) and myself as additional panelists. The focus of this particular panel was on the principles and implementation of validation and verification (V&V) in the computational sciences, with emphasis on the visualization process.

For those of you who don't know, V&V in this context is about ensuring that a software system meets specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. Validation addresses the question "Are we building the right thing?" and verification addresses the question "Are we building it right?"

Well who's going to disagree with a panel that advocates a culture of V&V? It's hard to have a provocative and entertaining panel when the thesis is generally agreed on by everyone. But that's one of the key points of the panel: we often take things for granted, so we have to build into our DNA essential, basic principles such as validation and verification to achieve the culture we desire.