Interview Questions

What is the purpose of black box testing?

Software QA/Testing Technical FAQs


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What is the purpose of black box testing?


Answer1:
The main purpose of BB Testing is to validate that the application works as the user will be operating it and in the environments of their systems. How do you do system testing and integration testing?
You may lose time and money but you may also lose Quality and eventually Customers!

Answer2:
"What is the purpose of black box testing?"
Black-box testing checks that the user interface and user inputs and outputs all work correctly. Part of this is that error handling must work correctly. It's used in functional and system testing.
"We do everything in white box testing: - we check each module's function in the unit testing"
Who is "we"? Are you programmers or quality assurance testers? Usually, unit testing is done by programmers, and white-box testing would be how they'd do it.
"- once unit test result is ok, means that modules work correctly (according to the requirement documemts)"
Not quite. It means that on a stand-alone basis, each module is okay. White box testing only tests the internal structure of the program, the code paths. Functional testing is needed to test how the individual components work together, and this is best done from an external perspective, meaning by using the software the way an end user would, without reference to the code (which is what black-box testing is).
if we doing testing again in black box will we lose time and money?"
No, the opposite: You'll lose money from having to repair errors you didn't catch with the white-box testing if you don't do some black-box testing. It's far more expensive to fix errors after release than to test for them and fix them early on.
But again, who is "we"? The black box testers should not be the people who did the programming; they should be the QA team -- also some end users for the usability testing.
Now that I've said that, good programmers will run some basic black-box tests before handing the application to QA for testing. This isn't a substitute for having QA do the tests, but it's a lot quicker for the programmer to find and fix an error right away than to have to go through the whole process of reporting a bug, then fixing and releasing a new build, then retesting.

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