VV&A is a four-letter word. Often begun as an afterthought, verification, validation and accreditation (VV&A) efforts for modeling and simulation (M&S) software can be cumbersome, buried in unnecessary detail, and extraordinarily resource intensive. In an effort to assist a sponsor in approaching the verification and validation process, the researchers developed a practical, highly methodical, and generalizable framework for providing a cost-effective approach to the VV&A process. The framework relies on the completion of a viable set of requirements and begins with reviewing those requirements with the sponsor/end user to determine which requirements seem to be primary and which are secondary to the planned use of the simulation. This initial assessment is supplemented by interviews with the end user to determine what scenarios the user intends to simulate with the software and the conditions in which those scenarios will be executed. The scenarios and the conditions for those scenarios are developed into a weighting tree that provides weighting factors that can be applied to the requirements to yield a weighted criticality for each requirement. When sorted using these weighted criticality values, the resultant list constitutes the priorities for validation. The sponsor's assessment of the primary and secondary importance of the requirements provides a means of developing trade spaces for the V&V effort. The sponsor now has a repeatable process, based on the intended use for the simulation, allowing triage of a large number of requirements by placing the emphasis where it is needed. The V&V agent then can approach the problem in a way that places the emphasis on the most critical requirements and helps avoid wasting precious resources on non-essentials.