Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility

NASA's Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) Program was established in 1993 as part of an agency-wide strategy to provide the highest achievable levels of safety and cost-effectiveness for mission critical software. NASA's IV&V Program was founded under the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) as a direct result of recommendations made by the National Research Council (NRC) and the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Since then, NASA's IV&V Program has experienced growth in personnel, projects, capabilities, and accomplishments. The NASA IV&V Program is responsible for providing a systems engineering function that is focused on partnering with missions to improve reliability, find defects earlier, reduce mission development cost, and mitigate operational risk related to the safety- and mission-critical software. Today, Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) is an Agency-level function, delegated from OSMA to Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and managed by NASA IV&V. NASA's IV&V Program's primary business, software IV&V, is sponsored by OSMA as a software assurance technology. Having been reassigned as GSFC, NASA IV&V is Code 180 (Center Director's direct report).

NASA's IV&V Program houses approximately 270 employees and leverages the expertise of in-house partners and contractors. Its facilities are located in Fairmont, West Virginia. As a result of being located in North Central West Virginia, the NASA IV&V Program boasts some of the lowest cost (labor rate) systems and software engineers in the country.

NASA's IV&V Program is focused on employing effective and efficient technical solutions that maximize the value being provided to NASA's highest profile missions. In 2022, to reduce operational and overhead expenses, the IV&V program consolidated its operations into a single facility thereby allowing the elimination of leased office space and more funding being made available for mission support. The IV&V Facility currently operates at approximately 95% of its physical capacity.

On February 22, 2019, the facility was renamed to the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility in honor of Katherine Johnson, who worked as a mathematician at NASA for 35 years and who is featured in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.