Verification and Testing
Once a circuit has been designed, it must be both verified and tested. Verification is the process of going through each stage of a design and ensuring that it will do what the specification requires it to do. This is frequently a highly mathematical process and can involve large-scale computer simulations of the design. In any complicated design it is very likely that problems will be found at this stage and may involve a large amount of the design work be redone in order to fix them.
Testing is the real-world counterpart to verification, testing involves physically building at least a prototype of the design and then (in combination with the test procedures in the specification or added to it) checking the circuit really does do what it was designed to.
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Famous quotes containing the words verification and/or testing:
“A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is direct and simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)
“Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)