⬛ Black Box Testing

Black box testing means that knowledge of the internals of the product doesn't play a significant part in your testing.

• Most testers are black box testers.
  • To do black box testing well:
    • Learn and understand
      • The end-user
      • The expectations and needs
      • The risks
      • The priorities
      • Any external API or software interaction
      • The data the software must manage
      • The development process
• Black box testing is often conveniently advantageous because developers will commonly develop cognitive biases from staring at the same application as they build it.
• Black box testing is NOT ignorance-based testing where the tester purposefully avoids learning any information about the application.
  • This is a common misunderstanding since the more you learn about a product, and the more ways in which you understand the context of its use, the better you will be able to test it.
    • However if your primary focus is on the source code, you understand what each function for example is supposed to do, and you primarily design tests from the source code itself, you will not only be covering ground the programmer has probably covered already (and with less knowledge of that code than they had) you will neglect to cover the common blind-spots that result such as confirmation bias.