Applying NASA IV&V Methodologies to Commercial Aircraft Flight Software

As commercial aircraft become more and more advanced, their underlying software avionics control and support systems will become increasingly more complex, which can easily lead to overall software requirements issues, software design flaws, or software implementation errors. With this increasing complexity, the Verification and Validation (V&V) of these software systems will need to follow strict and structured software processes and procedures to decrease the potential for unintended software errors or errant functionality so that the Loss of Life and/or Loss of Vehicle can be minimized. As such, there may be a need to perform additional independent evaluations and testing of the numerous software products that are typical of a large software engineering project. These additional software evaluations and assessments, known as Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V), have been successfully used in the aerospace industry for spacecraft developed both by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and by commercial companies.