What is black-box testing in software testing?

Black-box testing is a software testing technique in which we test software applications’ functionalities without knowing much about the internal structure/design of the item.

In black-box, a user provides input and observes the output generated by the system under test. Black-box testing is commonly known as behavioral testing, since we follow the behavior of the overall design.

How to conduct black-box testing

To conduct black-box testing on an item, we implement a variety of steps and techniques to check the behavior of that item. Those techniques include:

1. Equivalence Class Partitioning (ECP): Here, we divide the input data into valid and invalid values to check whether or not they exhibit the same behavior.

2. Boundary Value Analysis (BVA): We set a boundary value lower or higher than the actual limit to check the behavior of our system in both conditions.

3. State Transition Testing (STT): In this technique, we check the overall flow of a particular module in our system to see if the expected result matches the actual outcome.

4. Decision Table Testing (DTT): This is a systematic approach that provides various input combinations and captures their system behavior in a tabular form.

5. Error Guessing Testing (EGT): This technique focuses on the tester’s experience. There’s no specific set of rules to test the behavior of a system with this technique.