Similarly, in
electrical engineering/
hardware design, verification means checking whether your design follows the
specification. In other words, does the thing do what you wanted it to? In
hardware design, verification is seen to take up to 70% of the time spent on a project.
An anecdote: When the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA) held a Verification Workshop in 1999, their conclusion was "Verification is hard." The final conclusion was changed a few weeks later to "Verification is not hard. It is very hard." The third VSIA verification meeting concluded "Verification is not just very hard, it is very, very hard."
(Source: Rashinkar et.al, "System-on-a-chip Verification", Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001)