To an organization involved in the construction of mission critical software, the safety and reliability of critical systems including their software is of utmost importance. The use of an independent group to provide verification and validation (IV&V) is intended to improve the quality of the software products. We seek to optimize the planning and execution of IV&V activities upon organizations that are already assessed with a certain level of process maturity, such as proposed by the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI). © 2004 IEEE.