This project's fundamental goal is to increase the reliability and security of software systems. Computer systems are increasingly assuming critical roles in safety- and security-critical systems, and software systems are increasing in complexity as they include concurrency, parallelism, and distributed functionality. Almost all viruses, worms, security attacks, and equipment malfunctions are due to flaws in software design or implementation that were not detected with piecemeal V&V methods. The project will develop a unified and comprehensive approach to the verification and validation (V&V) of software systems. This comprehensive approach will incorporate verification and validation of both functional properties and non-functional properties, such as performance. Todate, there does not exist a comprehensive analysis of the synergisms and overlaps of these methods and tools, much less a unified approach to V&V that exploits both synergisms and complementarities. A systematic synthesis and unification of V&V methods for software systems, will be pursued in this project, by synergistic research and integration of several major sub-disciplines of computer science.
