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What's the difference between data Validation and Verification? [closed]

My recollection from a past employer is that they distinguished between the two as follows:

  • Validation is the process of checking that the data is appropriate in a very basic sense; for example that data in a date field can be converted to a date, or that characters in a number field can be converted to a number of the appropriate type;
  • Verification is the process of checking the typed data against some other 'business' rules that you impose on your interface - for example that the Date Of Birth field indicates an applicant within a certain age range.

These memories do not tie in with the Wikipedia article on the subject, nor a BBC BiteSize Revision article.

So what is the consensus: Do people care what methods and processes are called when I am checking Xml inputs for example?

What am I doing when I:

  1. Check that a date field contains characters that are convertible to a C# DateTime;
  2. Check that the DateTime is in an appropriate date range to be stored in SQL Server;
  3. Check that the Date Of Birth indicates a customer over 18 but under 65?
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Nij Avatar asked Apr 14 '11 07:04

Nij


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2 Answers

In my vocabulary, validation is checking whether the format of the data is correct, IE if a you're actually dealing with a correctly formatted date string . Verification is checking whether the date you got is actually the date you were expecting.

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Rik Avatar answered Sep 30 '22 04:09

Rik


Ok, so I'll take this as an open invitation to musing...

I think the difference is very much like compile-time vs. runtime errors. Just like the compiler is able to tell that two variables a,b are of type double, and thus the expression a/b is valid, it is only during runtime a DivideByZeroException may be raised if b turns out to be 0.

So to complete the analogy, one can validate that a string looks like a credit card number ('compile time'), but can only verify that it corresponds to a valid card only if one tries to charge the credit card ('runtime') with an amount

Duh. So I guess I understand it pretty much like you old company does.

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bottlenecked Avatar answered Sep 30 '22 03:09

bottlenecked