Advantages and Disadvantage of Whitebox Testing

Advantages of white box testing

·         Forces test developer to reason carefully about implementation.

·         Approximates the partitioning done by execution equivalence

·         Reveals errors in "hidden" code:

·         Beneficent side-effects

·         Optimizations (e.g. chartable that changes reps when size > 100)

·         As the knowledge of internal coding structure is prerequisite, it becomes very easy to find out which type of input/data can help in testing the application effectively.

·         The other advantage of white box testing is that it helps in optimizing the code

·         It helps in removing the extra lines of code, which can bring in hidden defects.

Disadvantages of white box testing

·        Expensive

·         Miss cases omitted in the code

·         As knowledge of code and internal structure is a prerequisite, a skilled tester is needed to carry out this type of testing, which increases the cost.

·         And it is nearly impossible to look into every bit of code to find out hidden errors, which may create problems, resulting in failure of the application

·         Not looking at the code in a runtime environment. That's important for a number of reasons. Exploitation of vulnerability is dependent upon all aspects of the platform being targeted and source code is just of those components. The underlying operating system, the backend database being used, third party security tools, dependent libraries, etc. must all be taken into account when determining exploitability. A source code review is not able to take these factors into account

·         Very few white-box tests can be done without modifying the program, changing values to force different execution paths, or to generate a full range of inputs to test a particular function