Difference Between Verification and Validation Testing

Validation and Verification testing are important components in software industry and are often clubbed together to form a single term, but do you know that these two terms have subtle difference in what tasks they perform and what goal is designated to each of the process. To point out the objectives each of the process possesses, verification has the object to ensure that the product built is as per the requirements and specifications allotted to the design and validation has the goal to ensure that the product is meeting the user requirements or not.

Head to Head Comparison Between Verification vs Validation Testing (Infographics)

Key Differences Between Verification and Validation Testing

Lets discuss the following differences of verification and validation testing.

Before we set out to point out the differences of verification and validation testing, let us first set our context right on definition of Validation and verification and then we will point out the differences in a proper format.
Verification is defined as the process of evaluating products related to work, not necessarily from the final product, during the development phase so that it can be determined that the requirement is met during that phase.
Validation is defined as process of evaluating a software to determine if the software satisfies the user requirements.
In other words, Validation intends to fulfill the intended wishes of user when placed under intended environment whereas Verification intends to check if the requirements of the phases are met.
Now let us go into the differences one by one: Verification follows a process to ensure that we are building the product as per the specification mentioned during the development during that phase, whereas validation on other hand ensures that the product we are developing meets the customer requirements and the intend of development of the product.
In the verification testing one requires no actual portion of the code running, whereas in validation the team needs to run the portion of the code to ensure that the product we are building is correct to the customer requirement or not.
Next, one needs to perform activities like reviews, walkthrough and inspection to perform the designated task in verification, whereas in validation there are specific testing like white box, black box, smoke, regression, functional to ensure the intent of the process.
Here both the processes have designated ISO/IEC standards to maintain uniform process across the industry. To list a few activities in Verification which falls under the standardized platform are, code verification must be accompanied with code review, Document verification relates to the verification of user manuals and other related documents and so on.
Listing a few activities for Validation in the standardized platform are, testing for boundary values, stress and functional, preparation of test manuals, documents and specific test cases to cater to the requirements is an absolute “yes” as a part of standardization.
The process in verification is static in nature whereas Validation is dynamic in nature. Also, since verification comes pretty early in the development phase, one can easily locate for bugs during this early phase and make sure that we push less bugs in the later stages of the development. Finding and rectifying bugs early in the system will help us minimizing the costs in going through the process of development and testing once again if it is found in the later stages of the development.
For verification we have dedicated quality assurance team to take care of the process, whereas in the verification process the software team along with the help of the testing team takes care of going through the process and ensuring everything is crystal clear correct.
Lastly, looking at the differences, we can expect to understand the subtle difference between verification and validation testing, which are quite often used interchangeably in software industry with a subtle statement of difference, on which verification is about “Are we building the product right” and validation is about “Are we building the right product”. The answers to these 2 subtle difference in statement would answer your subtleness in these 2 terms.

Verification vs Validation Testing Comparison Table

Below are the primary comparison:

Intention	Verification	Validation
Process to	Ensure we develop product as per the specifications and thus ensuring that the software we develop are conforming to the specifications.	Ensure that the product developed, is developed correctly and that the product developed meets the customer requirements or not
Involvement	In Verification there is no, or very little code execution and code is not actually run.	The product is validated on execution of code while running the code.
Activities	Here we have activities like reviews, walkthrough of the product, inspection, and many product feature matching related activities.	Activities here include specific White box testing, black box testing and some non-functional testing intended to check the product development.
Process Type	The process includes static way of checking files and documents.	The process is dynamic while testing on the real product.
Target area	This targets the architectural level checks, like application checking, database design, high level design etc.	This targets the actual product checking.
Benefit	One can find bug in the early stage of the development and hence will be easily rectified.	It finds the bugs which might have got missed during Verification process.
Team involved	Quality assurance team is employed during the verification process.	The software team with help of testing team is responsible for the validation process.
Question Answered	The question that verification answers is: “Are we building the product right?”	The question that validation answers is: “Are we building the right product.”

Conclusion

Going through all the differences, we are well able to understand the differences which lies in between verification and validation testing. Both together, V&V, ensures that the products developed is fit to use, and conform to the requirements. Now summing it all up, verification process ensures reviewing of activities or the static testing techniques and validation is an actual test being performed in a dynamic environment. One more thing one needs to keep in mind is that verification might not involve the product directly whereas validation necessarily needs the product to be inspected. Finally one needs to keep in mind that V&V is a process which needs to be a collective effort of the software team, including developers, testers and product owners and not just the specific team.

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