Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Black-box versus white-box testing for Go packages – an example

Black- and white-box testing are two different approaches to authoring unit tests. Each approach has its own set of merits and goals. Consequently, we shouldn't treat them as competing approaches but rather as one complementing the other. So, what is the major difference between these two types of tests?

Black-box testing works under the assumption that the underlying implementation details of the package that we test, also known as the subject under test (SUT), are totally opaque (hence the name black-box) to us, the tester. As a result, we can only test the public interface or behavior of a particular package and make sure it adheres to its advertised contract. On the other ...