Validation, accreditation or certification: A new kind of diagram to provide confidence

The aim of the argumentation diagram is to organize and visualize, in a synthetic way, all key elements proving the validity of a product's property. The argumentation diagram does not represent the process, but gives the rationale behind all Verification & Validation (V&V) documents. In fact, it lists and organizes necessary evidence in a development life cycle. But the validity of the final assessment requires the validation and the identification of the evidence of each intermediate step. So, in this article, we introduce a generic argumentation pattern and its derivations, whose support a rational organization of all V&V evidence at each step. This pattern stems from legal science and argumentation theory legacies, and it is the basic building block for the argumentation diagram construction.