White box (software engineering)
Appearance
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, Gray-box testing, System identification | |
Fundamentals | |
A priori information, Control systems, Open systems, Operations research, Thermodynamic systems | |
A white box[citation needed] (or glass box, clear box, or open box) is a subsystem whose internals can be viewed but usually not altered.
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.[citation needed] 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.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Mathematical_models_for_complex_systems.jpg/220px-Mathematical_models_for_complex_systems.jpg)
See also