Comparing Model Generated with Expert Generated IV&V Activity Plans

Abstract

An IV&V activity plan describes what assurance activities to perform, where to do them, when, and to what extent. Meaningful justification for an IV&V budget and evidence that activities performed actually provide high assurance has been difficult to provide from plans created (generally ad hoc) by experts. JAXA now uses the "strategic IV&V planning and cost model" to addresses these issues and complement expert planning activities. This research presents a grounded empirical study that compares plans generated by the strategic model to those created by experts on several past IV&V projects. Through this research, we found that the model generated plan typically is a superset of the experts ' plan. We found that experts tended to follow the most cost-effective route but had a bias in their particular activity selections. Ultimately we found increased confidence in both expert and model based planning and now have new tools for assessing and improving them.