Properties of the Utility of Verification

Verification is an essential aspect of systems engineering. Verification activities provide evidence that the system under development does what it was anticipated to do. In acquisition programs, verification activities provide evidence of contractual fulfilment. In fact, a major financial portion of system development is spent towards designing and executing a verification strategy. However, the design of verification strategies in current practice is often prescribed by standards and driven by good practices and gut feeling. Quantitative approaches to design verification strategies could yield significant improvement to their effectiveness and coverage. Understanding how verification contributes to a system's expected utility is necessary to enable such transformation. This paper presents four key properties of the utility of verification: the meaning of verification from an epistemological standpoint; the representation of verification within a mathematical framework of system development; the coupled nature of the value of verification activities; and the impossibility of objectively valuing verification.