Verification and validation
Most engineers will agree with the general statement that verification means demonstration that a system meets its requirements while validation means demonstration that the system meets the need. In my consulting work, I take this slightly further (Figure 5.1):
Figure 5.1: Verification and validation core concepts
In my mind, there are two kinds of verification: syntactic and semantic. Syntactic verification is also known as compliance in form, because it seeks to demonstrate that the model is well-formed, not necessarily that it makes sense or represents statements of truth. This means that the model complies with the modeling language syntactic rules and the project modeling standards guidelines. These guidelines typically define how the model should be organized, what information it should contain, the naming conventions that are used, and action language used for primitive actions, and so on. Every project should have a modeling guidelines...
