White-box testing

Black box systems
Black box systems
System
	Black box, Oracle machine
Methods and techniques
	Black-box testing, Blackboxing
Related techniques
	Feed forward, Obfuscation, Pattern recognition, White box, White-box testing, Gray-box testing, System identification
Fundamentals
	A priori information, Control systems, Open systems, Operations research, Thermodynamic systems
	v; t; e;

White-box testing (also known as clear box testing, glass box testing, transparent box testing, and structural testing) is a method of software testing that tests internal structures or workings of an application, as opposed to its functionality (i.e. black-box testing). In white-box testing, an internal perspective of the system is used to design test cases. The tester chooses inputs to exercise paths through the code and determine the expected outputs. This is analogous to testing nodes in a circuit, e.g. in-circuit testing (ICT). White-box testing can be applied at the unit, integration and system levels of the software testing process. Although traditional testers tended to think of white-box testing as being done at the unit level, it is used for integration and system testing more frequently today. It can test paths within a unit, paths between units during integration, and between subsystems during a system–level test. Though this method of test design can uncover many errors or problems, it has the potential to miss unimplemented parts of the specification or missing requirements. Where white-box testing is design-driven,^[1] that is, driven exclusively by agreed specifications of how each component of software is required to behave (as in DO-178C and ISO 26262 processes), white-box test techniques can accomplish assessment for unimplemented or missing requirements.

White-box test design techniques include the following code coverage criteria:

Control flow testing
Data flow testing
Branch testing
Statement coverage
Decision coverage
Modified condition/decision coverage
Prime path testing
Path testing

^ Stacy Nelson (June 2003), NASA/CR–2003-212806 Certification Processes for Safety-Critical and Mission-Critical Aerospace Software (PDF), Ames Research Center, p. 25, [Glossary] White Box Testing: Design-driven testing where engineers examine internal workings of code

[1] Stacy Nelson (June 2003), NASA/CR–2003-212806 Certification Processes for Safety-Critical and Mission-Critical Aerospace Software (PDF), Ames Research Center, p. 25, [Glossary] White Box Testing: Design-driven testing where engineers examine internal workings of code

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