Software Verification and Validation

CS 458 tackles the question of how you actually gain confidence that a piece of software does what it's supposed to do — going beyond "run it and see" toward systematic techniques like coverage-driven structural testing, specification-based partitioning, model checking with temporal logic, and runtime verification. Expect to write tests in JUnit, derive test cases from finite-state and dataflow models, apply coverage metrics to real code, and work through projects alongside quizzes and exams that push you to justify *why* a test suite is adequate, not just that it passes. Coming after the core software engineering sequence, it's where you stop treating testing as an afterthought and start reasoning about correctness as a first-class engineering activity — useful preparation for safety-critical work, formal methods electives, or any industry role where shipping broken code has real consequences.