Black box testing also known as functional testing or behavioraltesting treats the system as a “black-box”, so it doesn’t explicitly use Knowledge of the internal structure or code. Or in other words the Test engineer need not know the internal working of the “Black box” or application.Main focus in black box testing is on functionality of the system as a whole.
Black box testing occurs throughout the software development and testing life cycle i.e. in Unit, Integration, System, Acceptance and regression testing stages.
Advantages of Black Box Testing
- Tester can be non-technical.
- Used to verify contradictions in actual system and the specifications.
- Test cases can be designed as soon as the functional specifications are complete
Disadvantages of Black Box Testing
- The test inputs needs to be from large sample space.
- It is difficult to identify all possible inputs in limited testing time. So writing test cases is slow and difficult
- Chances of having unidentified paths during this testing
Methods of Black box Testing:
1. Graph Based Testing Methods:
Each and every application is build up of some objects. All such objects are identified and graph is prepared. From this object graph each object relationship is identified and test cases written accordingly to discover the errors.2. Error Guessing:
This is purely based on previous experience and judgment of tester. Error Guessing is the art of guessing where errors can be hidden. For this technique there are no specific tools, writing the test cases that cover all the application paths.3. Boundary Value Analysis:
Many systems have tendency to fail on boundary. So testing boundary values of application is important. Boundary Value Analysis (BVA) is a test Functional Testing technique where the extreme boundary values are chosen. Boundary values include maximum, minimum, just inside/outside boundaries, typical values, and error values. Extends equivalence partitioningTest both sides of each boundary
Look at output boundaries for test cases too
Test min, min-1, max, max+1, typical values
· BVA techniques:
Number of variables
Kinds of ranges
Generalizing ranges depends on the nature or type of variables
Advantages of Boundary Value Analysis
Robustness Testing - Boundary Value Analysis plus values that go beyond the limits
Min - 1, Min, Min +1, Nom, Max -1, Max, Max +1
Forces attention to exception handling
Anonymous User
12-Feb-2019Thanks for the help.
Sunil Singh
22-Jun-2017This article is truly nice.