SE Validation Limited

Focusing on validation

We specialise in the essential processes of verifying and validation, both in carrying them out and in raising awareness about the risks and economic impacts of not properly planning and implementing these critical activities.

Validation is all about deciding and demonstrating if you are building, or have built, the right thing - something that is 'fit for purpose' - safe, suitable, survivable and effective - when operating through-life in its working environment. Validation is often left too late and exposes that which has been built is not 'right' but costs too much to change. This means only essential changes are made, resulting in the project running late and over budget and ending up not really fit for anybody's purpose.

Enabling efficient verification

Verification is about ensuring that what you are building will meet: its specification, the contract, regulations, standards, the law, etc. This is usually a simpler task than validation, because all these are documented. However, verification is vital, particularly because it is often associated with getting paid! Unless one is lucky enough to have a product that can be verified by inspection, verification involves collecting evidence right through the design, development and build process. Finding that some needed verification evidence is missing when you come to claim payment can be a very costly for both reputation and the bottom line. Verification can never be a substitute for validation, but it provides the essential foundations for it.

Wide and deep expertise

At SE Validation we understand the full scope and complexities of validation and verification. We have particular expertise in difficult areas such as: complex capabilities involving people and software, systems-of-systems, high-integrity systems, network-centric systems. Since any efficient approach to verification and validation needs to be assurance based - knowing where there will be problems in time to fix them - the use of predictive modelling, simulation and synthetic environments becomes essential. SE Validation has unrivalled experience in the verification and validation of these.

Synergy and continuous learning

Since SE Validation Limited operates across a number of domains - safety, systems, software, simulation, etc. - it is able to achieve considerable benefits by bringing together proven techniques from these different domains. For example the SimuLASCE toolset currently brings together 'Problem Frame' (PF) methods from the software requirements community and 'Claims/Argument/Evidence' (CAE) notation from the safety engineering domain (see Tools). SimulASCE is being developed to support the Region Europe VV&A (REVVA) consortium that is looking to develop new standardised methods of verifying and validating models and simulations. The combined PF & CAE notations have already been use d to develop exemplar plans and reports for another Europa international programme.

SE Validation Limited also aims to collaborate with both industry and academia in developing new methods to solve the challenges that we come across in our work for customers. One innovative company that we have successfully worked with in this way is Clarity Support Limited