To develop safe business software ISVV contributes to reduce the cost of development by early findings of faults, and thereby providing software confidence for the company’s stakeholders. Planning for ISVV should therefore start as early as possible to reap the full benefits.

DNV needs the following information to do the initial ISVV process assessment and to consider efforts needed:

• What the system is supposed to do, and the main components of the system

• The main concerns regarding the system, and an initial assessment of criticality of different software components

• Whether ISVV is considered for its ability to find faults early or for creating confidence in the final product

• The industrial structure of the development effort

• The size of software

• The formalisms and programming language utilised for specification

• The maturity of software development organisations.

Immature software

For immature software development organisations, the maturity of documents is low and cannot be expected to improve in later iterations. ISVV cannot be performed unless the development organisation is assisted in improving specifications and software development processes. DNV offers services to:

• Assess the maturity of software development organisations in accordance with well known international standards, such as ISO 12207, Tick-IT, CMMI and SPICE

• Improve processes of software development organisations

• Provide advice on notations, structure and contents of requirement, design specifications, code and other specifications.