Every project developed by Absolute Software has a testing specification which allows us to ensure that the finished product meets the requirements of the project specification and is bug free. As well as a final testing phase we also test our embedded software at regular intervals during development, this allows us to report to the customer the progress of the project.
We use both black box and white box testing to ensure the reliability of our software.
Black box testing (or Functional testing) is a technique where the tester has no knowledge of the internal workings of the software. An added bonus of using this method is that it allows us to easily see how people not involved in the project would use the system and highlights any possible confusion about how the product works.
Although Black box testing allows us to test certain aspects of a system and is useful for ensuring that the system meets the specifications of the system it does have a few drawback. The biggest drawback of Black box testing is that it would require a large amount of time to test every possible input that even some of our more basic systems accept and most of these tests would probably overlap each other. For this reason we also use White box testing which allows a more defined testing procedure.
White box testing (or Structural testing) is a technique where the tester knows the internal workings of the software. White box testing allows more targeted testing as knowledge of the inner workings of the software allow the tester to test individual modules to ensure they work correctly. White box testing will normally be undertaken by the developers at various points during the development of the product and then again at the end of the development to ensure nothing has changed.