Black-Box Functional Testing

“Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle.” No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle…

The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Black-box functional testing is what most people imagine when they think of software testing. Of all the chapters in this book, this one will likely be most familiar to you. If you’ve done any software testing, it will have started here.

Black-box testing covers the happy-path scenarios—the working cases that show the feature behaving as it should under normal conditions. Since this is only one chapter in a much larger book, you can...