It is impractical and often impossible to find all the errors in a program. This fundamental problem in testing thus throws open the question as to what would be the strategy that you would adopt to test. Two of the most prevalent strategies include black-box testing and white-box testing.
Black-Box testing
* Examines the fundamental aspect of the system with little or no regard to the internal logical structure of the system.
* Demonstrates that software functions are operational and the input is properly accepted and output is correct produced.
* Integrity of the external information (eg. Database) is maintained.
BLACK BOX TESTING STRATEGY – would involve different types of Testing. When the Build is for the first time to test – we start with Validations and Verifications wrt the Scope/SRS document or Mapped Test Cases. We even start tracing the Traceability Matrix. We mark the observations as in Severity and Priority and publish a Testing Report. Next Build onwards we start with Smoke Testing Phase – if test cases report FAIL STATUS then we reject the build saying it Non Testable. If the cases are of PASS STATUS we start with System Testing, Include Regression Testing – verifying the old bugs and though Impact Analysis of each Bug. If new functionalities are there then we do Integration Testing. IN ALL the Builds we incorporate Usability Testing – checking UI, Messages, and other User perspective points. We incorporate Database Testing – through SQL Commands to check the Data Driven Scenarios.Last but not the least cover the Security Testing phase – especially in cases of web applications.
White-Box testing / Glass-Box testing
* Examines the fundamental aspect of the system with complete information and access to the internal logical structure, code and algorithms.
* Logical paths are tested. Test cases which tests the loops (DO LOOP) and conditions (IF STATEMENTS) are explicitly designed and used to test the logical paths.