Cost Estimation for Independent Systems Verification and Validation

Validation, verification, and especially certification are skill and effort demanding activities. Typically, specialized small and medium enterprises perform the independent assessment of safety critical applications. Prediction of the work needed to accomplish them is crucial for the management of such projects, which is by nature heavily dependent on the implementation of the V&V process and its support. Process management widely uses cost estimators in planning of software development projects for resource allocation. Cost estimators use the scoring of a set of cost influencing factors, as input. They use extrapolation functions calibrated previously on measures extracted from a set of representative historical project records. These predictors do not provide reliable measures for the separate phases of verification, validation and certification in safety critical projects.