To help guide me I listed some questions I felt an FEA engineer would want to ask and posted them as open questions in my LinkedIn Group (Finite Element Analysis Training).

• What are Verification and Validation?
• How are they different?
• How do I apply this to FEA in “hands on” work, not as a software developer?
• Doesn’t Verification check against benchmark examples and Validation check against test?
• I check my work diligently, why do I need V&V?
• Shouldn’t my manager be worrying about this, not me?
• Bottom line, how would V&V help my client and me?

Some of the questions were a little tongue in cheek, but they prompted a good discussion. The list also gave me a baseline to work from, which I hoped would address the processes from a bottom up perspective, rather than the usual high-level view.