White Box Testing

Before getting into Whitebox testing, it is recommended that you know at least the basics of the programming language or set of languages that have been used to write the software that you're aiming to test.

Web Applications are typically written using JavaScript however Python, C#, Java and some other languages are also being used, primarily on the backend of Web Applications, throughout the industry.

Method of Software Testing

There are at least two methods of testing the program that come under the category of Whitebox Testing.

The first method is, manually going through the code, observing the control flow of the application, and writing test cases based on that. This is known is manual testing.

The other method is by writing scripts containing the test cases, such that all the test cases are automatically executed when the test script is run. Such kind of testing also falls under the category of automation testing, since we are automating the process of testing by writing a script.

Testing In Different Languages

• MochaJS is a framework that provides us with an environment for writing and running test cases, for-example it provides us with functions that are executed in a sequential or a specific order, and logs their output in the console.
• ChaiJS is an assertion library and is used along with MochaJS to write test cases. An assertion simply asserts that one value must be equal to another, similar to an if statement but with advanced features.

In Java, JUnit Testing Framework is typically used for writing unit test cases.

Whereas, in C#, the most popular testing framework is MSTest Framework, which comes with the .NET Desktop Development installation.

The unittest module in Python is used for writing test cases.

Types of Automation Tests

There are two categories of tests which we can write in the form of code. Namely, Unit Tests and Structural Tests.

Unit Tests are simply tests that verify the functionality of an independent part or Unit of the application.

Structural Tests are tests that deal with checking the actual structure of the code rather than the functionality of the application.

We can perform structural tests by manually looking at the code and verifying the requirements, or, we can use a testing framework to define the requirements and verify it using an automated script. For-example, In Java, JUnit 5 gives us some useful assertions for checking if a class has certain members and even the visibility level of each class member.

Overall, Whitebox testing, and writing test cases in code is a very broad topic and it can be challenging to cover all the aspects in one chapter, however this chapter aimed to give some introductory information on various different parts of Whitebox Testing.