Software validation: A government-imposed challenge to the state-of-the-art in certification

Software certification can well be a problem when the products to be certified are: 1. i) implemented differently by different manufacturers; 2. ii) only functionally equivalent for a subset of their outputs; 3. iii) validated by a single, public institution. The paper presents a case of this type and describes the efforts made by the working group responsible for performing the validation task.