Green Builds Don't Mean You Built the Right Thing

Verification and validation are two words that get used interchangeably in software development. Verification asks whether the system was built correctly — whether it does what its specification says. Validation asks whether the correct system was built — whether that specification reflected something the user actually needed. A correct system does what its specification says. A valid one does what the user actually needs. The two can diverge considerably — and a passing test suite, however thorough, only ever confirms the first.

This gap has always existed. What changes with AI-assisted development is how quickly, and how confidently, a team can arrive at the wrong destination. Code that once took a week to write and another week to test can now be produced and verified in hours. Yet, somehow — eventually, a user encounters a workflow that technically functions but doesn’t fit the way they actually work — because nobody confirmed that the spec reflected their real need before the build started.

In teams that are shipping fast for the first time, this tends to be the last gap to get attention — because the feedback loop that catches it runs on a very different clock to the one catching a failing test. A broken test surfaces within minutes of a commit. A feature that solves the wrong problem surfaces in a support ticket, a churn conversation, or a product review — weeks or months after the decision that caused it. The signal is delayed, diffuse, and easy to attribute to something else. By then, more AI-assisted features have shipped on top of the same misunderstanding.

The concepts of verification and validation predate AI by decades. What it has changed is how easy it is to produce a well-verified system so quickly that the validation question never quite gets asked. Speed through the correctness layer is genuinely valuable — but only if there’s a validation layer in front of it doing its own work. I’ve written about how an unclear backlog produces this problem upstream — the green build is often where you discover, too late, that the backlog item was never properly understood.

If you’re ready to go further, let’s explore how closing the gap between correctness and validity can work for your team. Reach out today, and let’s make sure your delivery speed is building on solid ground.