VALENS pilot at Postbank Nederland

While VALENS was still in development (1.0 alpha version 2), Postbank Nederland BV became interested in the promise of a verification and validation tool for their AionDS assessment knowledge base. LibRT took the challenge because the VALENS kernel was finished and ready to be tested in a real business situation. The Postbank agreed to compensate for the time spent on presentation of the results in a two months pilot project and evaluate the results afterwards.

The business situation

The target knowledge base had been written in AionDS 7. Because then VALENS was developed for Aion8 knowledge bases, the target knowledge base had to be converted to an Aion8 knowledge base. The conversion process was accomplished in a day using the Aion8's conversion supporting tool ORCA. Important in this respect is that VALENS only needs a 'valid rule base' to verify the rules: no GUI or other interfaces need to be converted.

LibRT got the first version of the customer's KB to verify when the developing team of the Postbank had finished the rule base and the testing phase was at hand. Though VALENS can be applied earlier in the application development lifecycle it was perfect timing for our alpha version: there would be a parallel verification and testing phase so the results of both processes could be compared.

The results of the VALENS pilot

VALENS did not detect any real errors in the knowledge base. Though this might look disappointing, the testing phase neither did reveal any error that could have been detected by verification. Remember that technical or logical verification cannot take any domain knowledge into account that is not present in the knowledge base. Therefore, VALENS cannot be used for user acceptation tests.

VALENS did find many redundant and obsolete constructs in the knowledge base. Some of these constructs were intentional, others were not, but everyone was impressed with the fact that VALENS was able to highlight these 'points of interest'.

VALENS proofed to be of good use in maintaining the integrity of the functional specifications of the knowledge base and the realized (and revised!) knowledge base.

Of course, VALENS detected problems that were not problems at all but thanks to this pilot project, VALENS has become more mature and robust.

After three months, the pilot project was not continued because it became clear that the target knowledge base will probably never be converted to an Aion8 knowledge base.

Nevertheless, Postbank Nederland and LibRT BV are happy with the results of the pilot project.