Personal website – Software Engineering & Architecture Practices
WhiteBox Testing
In Software Engineering, we chant the term of validation and verification a lot between the software team members. Actually, it is used across the software project phases and I think there is a misconception in understanding the two terminologies and when to use them.
Software Testing is vital for any software development life cycle, it is fundamental to ensure the software quality and to have a workable functional software at the end of the project.
“Testing is any activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its required results” Bill Hetzel, 1988
The main motive for the testing is to ensure that all functionalities are working correctly as per the requirements. It is not only that this is the basic purpose of testing, while It is important to test how to break the system, how to simulate the abuse of the system by the quality team before someone else does that for you and it will be a disaster at this time.
White box testing and analysis, by contrast with “black box” testing and analysis, that are mainly performed on the source code. Also known as glass box, structural, clear box, and open box testing.
White box analysis and tests include:
It is known as “code review,” static analysis analyses source code before it is compiled, to detect coding errors, insecure coding constructs, and other indicators of security vulnerabilities or weaknesses that are detectable at the source code level. Static analyses can be manual or automated. In a manual analysis, the reviewer inspects the source code without the assistance of tools.
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Most of the software security practitioners would agree that the common practice of postponing security analysis and tests after the software implementation phase and even after it has been deployed (i.e., during its acceptance phase), makes it extremely difficult to address in a cost-effective, timely manner any vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered during the analysis and testing process.
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In the Software industry, Most of the clients have a main requirement which is
“We want the system to be secured”.
Security is a non-functional property of the system, the main goal for securing the system to make this system dependable. So, we can depend on this system and it can perform its excepted functions as required and specified.
Therefore, it is mandatory to run the security testing procedures to ensure that we can depend on this system, but we need also to consider some functional requirements on writing requirements specifications document that help to obtain this goal.
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