V&V in the public sector: an undergraduate thesis documents process improvement in a state software factory
Renan Cristyan Araujo Pinheiro defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis presenting a case study on improving software verification and validation processes in a public sector agency.
Brasília, 2022
Reputation and quality do not decouple for a software factory — and in the public sector, where many factories operate, that relationship gains extra layers: any bug that reaches the end user can turn into an administrative process. This is the context from which the undergraduate thesis defended in 2022 by Renan Cristyan Araujo Pinheiro sets out to document a V&V improvement effort, advised by Prof. Fabiana Freitas Mendes .
The work is a case study — a precious format because it exposes what generic literature cannot: the effective decisions of a real team, the trade-offs that must be made in tight schedules, and how institutional culture hinders or helps the installation of new practices. The underlying question is how to translate signals of insufficient quality into surgical process interventions — without falling into the temptation of rewriting everything.
The work speaks to verification and validation and offers a useful angle for those studying continuous improvement: what changes when the client is the State, the contractor is a public tender, and the factory operates with hybrid teams of civil servants and outsourced staff.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.