Design and Development of Aircraft Systems, 3rd Edition

7Verification of System Requirements

7.1 Introduction

In a large and complex system such as an aircraft or a warship it is impractical to build the entire product without first conducting some form of analysis to provide a high degree of confidence that the completed product will work to specification. The cost and the time involved in so doing would have a large impact on any programme, and yet the risk of proceeding without some kind of confidence that the system will work to specification is unacceptable.

In order to demonstrate to the customer that their requirement has been met, it is necessary to test the product throughout the lifecycle. The test results are evidence that the requirements can be demonstrably met. This testing is often performed on physical products such as prototypes. However, it is time‐consuming and costly to build experimental systems and prototypes, particularly if the design contains errors that must be corrected or if the operation is highly influenced by factors in the environment.

Figure 7.1 shows the V diagram and its review points as discussed in Chapter 6. In this version of the diagram the left‐hand side has been obscured to illustrate the fact that testing is usually thought to be conducted on the right‐hand side of the diagram, once hardware is available to test.

However, it should be acknowledged that there is a lot of evidence of correct understanding of requirements and solutions to the requirements that emerges during the design of ...