IV&V – AEGIS.net, Inc.

AEGIS Sponsors AFCEA Energy Conference

AEGIS once again sponsored the 2023 edition of the AFCEA Bethesda Chapter’s Energy, Infrastructure and Environment (EIE) conference held November 17 at the National Press Club. AEGIS has been a sponsor now for all three EIE conferences since the event’s 2021 inception as one of the earliest “post-Covid” in-person conferences in DC. This year, we […]

Managing Virtual Teams: Episode 2 – Managing Remote Teams for a Federal Agency

It was early March, the team had been talking about it for a few weeks now “what was going to happen if COVID-19 made it to Washington DC?” The beginnings of social distancing were starting to take hold; no one was shaking hands, you could see the hesitation when someone kindly offered a serving of […]

Coding With Blinders On

I saw a horse pulling a carriage the other day and noticed that the horse had blinders on. Blinders are those square pieces of leather on the side of each of the horse’s eyes. It prevents the horse from becoming distracted and allows it to focus on moving ahead when trotting among the city traffic. […]

Why Software Testing Needs Independence

We all know at least one person – who may or may not be considered a hypochondriac – who self-diagnoses his or her own health maladies. We sometimes know them well enough they will admit that, when they go the doctor and the doctor runs her own tests, the diagnosis is quite different. I’ll be the […]

Kanban: Not Just For Making Cars

Rewind back to 2015. My manager walks in and asks us to gather round as he announces excitedly we’ll be using kanban. “Kanban … isn’t that a manufacturing scheduling system?” I was slightly confused. I studied the concept in college. But I work as an automation tester, how is this relevant to what I do? […]

Embedded – Observations of an Agile IV&V Guinea Pig

~95% of my 25-year software consulting career has been spent in the service of, or contracted to, various offices and agencies of the United States Government. A considerable portion of the last 15 of those years has seen me plying my trade in the form of Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) at one agency in […]

Questionable Assumptions Threaten Federal Contracting Reform

There’s no question that federal contracting for technology services is finally achieving significant momentum toward innovations that are long overdue. To be clear: the acquisition techniques themselves are innovating in order to allow, in turn, for the end result of what the government receives to be technologically innovative. That’s a good thing. Nowhere in the […]

4 and 5

Recently while I was speaking with a group about one of AEGIS’ core services, Independent Verification Validation (IV&V), there was an exclamation from someone in the room: “Oh! I was wondering what ‘4 & 5’ was….” Unfortunately, the discipline of IV&V remains an obscure art, especially outside of the federal government. But even within government, […]

IV&V: Justify Thy Existence!

One challenge we frequently hear hurled at the practitioners and champions of independent verification and validation (IV&V) and quality assurance (QA) is, “How can you justify the cost?” Or sometimes, “How much did you actually save the program?” In other words, “Prove your value!” That’s a difficult request. The idea of IV&V and QA is […]