*School of Business Administration

Today, organizations like NASA and the US Department of Defense make heavy use of Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) techniques to improve the quality of systems and reduce the risks associated with the deployment of those systems. As more firms move to global outsourcing of their software development projects, IV&V will become increasingly valuable to companies as part of the their project activities. As a result, there is a critical need for cost effective IV&V. Software process simulation models (SPSMs) can be used to quantify the costs and benefits associated with both V&V and IV&V practices on software projects, enabling management to effectively allocate scarce resources for V&V and IV&V activities. The goals of this research are to quantitatively assess the economic benefit of performing IV&V on software development projects and to optimize that benefit across alternative IV&V plans. In this paper we present a model of one NASA project using the IEEE 12207 software development process with several possible IV&V configurations and assess their costs and benefits