KBS first prototype V&V process plan as a way to produce reliable requirements

The Quality Assessment Process is in charge of assuring several performances of the software products and processes. One of them is the Software Reliability, perhaps the closest concept to the more general of Quality. These Quality processes should be integrated with the product development and depend mainly on two issues. One is the development methodology and the other is the type of product. The Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) are products whose software production presents special difficulties for the Validation and Verification (V&) process application. Indeed, the knowledge characteristics they model, often incomplete, imprecise, inconsistent and uncertain, are solved by the application of heuristics whose validation is difficult to carry out without the systematic application of test cases. This makes that often the development of KBS goes through a life cycle based on prototypes to build a consistent core that can be modelled conceptually and formally. This article aims to describe the set of V&V process activities that can be applied to a KBS core, that is, the essential components of a V&V Plan. Indeed although this Plan is often not defined, it is essential to assure the reliability of the system requirements, result of the prototyping phase.