White Box Testing

White-box Testing is a software solution assessment, which mostly deals with the software’s internal infrastructure and coding. It emphasizes on enhancing security, regulating the flow of input & output through applications and improvising design & usability to a superior degree. It is otherwise known as Clear, Open, Structural or Glass-box Testing. Considering White-box Testing is concerned with inner workings of an application and revolves around its internal testing, it makes it more of an antonym of Black-box Testing.

What is the importance of White-box Testing?

A security interface that stringently checks a series of predefined inputs against expected outputs is what’s on demand, so that if they don’t match at all, then you have encountered the bug, which in other words is what White-box Testing is all about. The importance of White-box Testing arises out of the fact that:

• Enterprises forever are bound to have internal security loopholes and broken structured paths in their coding processes.
• The flow of specific inputs through the code may not always be legit, and their output need not necessarily be what was expected of them.
• The conditional loops may not always be at their functional best and testing of each statement, function and objects on an individual basis needn’t work in a practical perspective.

What are the different White-box Testing Methodologies?

White-box Testing principally involves two steps, which are: understanding the source code & creating test cases.

The first step is something which is indispensable for every tester. As White-box Testing involves the inner working of an organization, it demands the tester to have profound expertise in programming languages that are cases in point. The tester, with acute knowledge of secure coding practices, finds security issues and prevents attacks from hackers and naive users.

The second sources code for both, structure & proper flow. While one way is to write code to check the vulnerability of the application source code, another is to develop small tests for each process in the application.

The other popular methods include manual testing, trial, error testing and the use of testing tools, all of their agendas being the same.

What are the different techniques involved in White-box Testing

One of the most techniques involved in White-box Testing is called ‘Core Coverage Analysis’. While it focuses on eliminating gaps in a test suite, it alternatively identifies sections of a program that have not been exercised by test cases. The gaps once identified, then can be used to verify the untested parts of the code, all to enhance the software quality of the product. ‘Statement Coverage’ is another testing technique which requires every possible statement in the code to be tested at least once. ‘Batch Coverage’ is the third White-box Testing technique which misses no possible software application path for checking.

What are the Advantages of White-box Testing?

White-box Testing leverages an array of advantages. The testing:

• Enables test-care reusability and delivers a superior level of stability.
• Eliminates unnecessary lines of code.
• Employs optimization of codes.
• Locates hidden errors in the earliest forms of development.