Abstract Verification and validation activities take a substantial share of project budgets and need improvements. This is an accepted truth, but the current practices are seldom assessed and analyzed. In this paper, we present a qualita- tive survey of the verification and validation processes at 11 Swedish companies. The purpose was to exchange experience between the companies and to lay out a foun- dation for further research on the topic. The survey is con- ducted through workshop and interview sessions, loosely guided by a questionnaire scheme. It is concluded from the survey that there are substantial differences between small and large companies. In large companies, the documented process is emphasized while in small companies, single key persons have a dominating impact on the procedures. Large companies use commercial tools while small com- panies make in-house tools or use shareware. Common to all the surveyed companies is that verification and valida- tion is considered important, and thus having rather high status. An experience from the survey as such, is that the information exchange between the companies during the survey was considered very valuable to the involved sub- jects. 1. Introduction Verification and validation (V&V) are the activities performed during a software development project to ensure that the right system is developed and meets the expectations of its customers (validation) and that the developed system is correct and conforms to its specifica- tions (verification) [Boehm79]. The verification and vali- dation of software systems take a substantial share of project budgets. Classical rules of thumbs indicating how much time is spent on V&V still seem to be valid. Brooks, for example, devotes 50% of the budget for testing in his classical book “The Mythical Man-Month” [Brooks75]. However very little effort is spent actually surveying the current status of V&V activities today. Other parts of the development process are surveyed, for example require- ments engineering [Lubars92, Groves00], and particular attention has been paid to the application of scenarios [Weidenhaupt98]. A recently conducted quantitative sur- vey, with focus on lead time consumption, identifies the test process as taking very much of the lead-time when developing distributed real-time systems [Bratthall00]. In order to get a better picture of the current practice in industry, a qualitative survey has been conducted and is reported in this paper. The purpose is to learn how V&V is conducted in a set of companies, investigate variations between the companies, and trying to identify patterns in the observations. The survey serves two different purposes for the stakeholders in the survey. For the researchers, the survey acts as a starting point for further research on improvement of V&V processes. They want to identify issues relevant to industry for further research. For the industry participants, the survey acts as an experience interchange between peers in different non-competing companies. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, the methodology used in the survey is presented. Section 3 discusses the trustworthiness of the study. Section 4 presents the surveyed companies and their basic character- istics. In Section 5 we report the observations made, the analyses conducted and the findings made during the sur- vey, and finally, a summary is presented in Section 6. 2. Methodology The empirical research conducted within software engi- neering has so far primarily been of quantitative nature. However, software engineering empiricists should, like Robson in the social science research, play down the dif- ferences and regard the differences between qualitative and quantitative research as primarily technical [Robson93]. A quantitative study can provide exact answers to research questions, including statistical analysis with cer- tain confidence levels [Wohlin00]. However, the studied questions are for practical reasons of detailed nature, for Verification and Validation in Industry - A Qualitative Survey on the State of Practice Carina Andersson and Per Runeson Software Engineering Research Group Department of Communication Systems Lund University, Box 118, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden {carina.andersson,per.runeson}@telecom.lth.se