Teaching Cognitive IV&V

The goal of this workshop is to outline teaching methods for IV&V engineers. Initially, this paper will be very neg-ative about that goal, arguing that there is are major differ-ences between NASA software development practices and soft-ware development practices elsewhere. In that (very pessimistic) view, if NASA wants to train IV&V analysts on the specifics of NASA IV&V then they require a NASA-run university focusing on NASA applications to teach NASA SE principles to NASA IV&V analysts. That pessimism will be reversed by the second half of this paper. Using some cognitive theory, a new definition of IV&V will be proposed which could be used as the basis of a general IV&V education program. 1 Uniqueness of NASA In the past, NASA has been a rich source of SE research. One of the outstanding examples of that work was the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) experiments [1]. In the period 1976 to 1994, Basili and his colleagues reported impressive im-provements in a particular product line of satellites at NASA Goddard. Many of the quality improvement method developed there are often cited and widely applied including: • the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm [2] • clean room testing [14] • perspective-based inspection [15] While the contribution of these methods is indisputable, it would be misleading to represent the SEL experience as follows: “it worked at NASA, so it should work across the industry”