White box (software engineering)
A white box (or glass box, clear box, or open box) is a subsystem whose internals can be viewed but usually not altered.
Black box systems | |
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System | |
Black box · Oracle machine | |
Methods and techniques | |
Black-box testing · Blackboxing | |
Related techniques | |
Feed forward · Obfuscation · Pattern recognition · White box · White-box testing · System identification | |
Fundamentals | |
A priori information · Control systems · Open systems · Operations research · Thermodynamic systems | |
Having access to the subsystem internals in general makes the subsystem easier to understand but also easier to hack; for example, if a programmer can examine source code, weaknesses in an algorithm are much easier to discover. That makes white-box testing much more effective than black-box testing but considerably more difficult from the sophistication needed on the part of the tester to understand the subsystem.
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