Black-box and White-box Testing

After completing this course, learners will have an understanding of a variety of black-box and white-box testing techniques. The learner will have put this understanding into practice, creating effective sets of test cases (called a test suite) to properly exercise software for defect finding. The learner will have examined requirements for testability, created an oracle for automated testing, assessed fault-finding effectiveness of test suites, and generated inputs using a variety of techniques. After completing this course, you will be able to: - evaluate testability of requirements - define testable units within a program specification - apply black-box test input selection methods - specifically boundary-value analysis, fuzzing, and random selection - and select the method most-suited to achieve the given testing objective - assess the fault-finding effectiveness of a functional test suite using mutation testing - use category partitioning to develop automated functional tests (with Cucumber) based on a given software specification - create an expected-value oracle from a program description to use within the generated tests In order to do well in this course, you should have experience with an OOP language (like Java), have an IDE installed (e.g., Eclipse), and be familiar with testing terminology (see Intro to Software Testing course within this specialization). we also expect a familiarity with the Software Development Lifecycle and the context in which the testing stage sits. This course is primarily aimed at those learners interested in any of the following roles: Software Engineer, Software Engineer in Test, Test Automation Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Software Developer, Programmer, Computer Enthusiast.

Status: Testability

Status: Functional Testing

IntermediateCourse26 hours

Featured reviews

Reviewed Jul 15, 2024

I'm an university student. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the lecturers, University and Coursera. This course is amazing.

All reviews

Showing: 20 of 41

Gerd

1.0

Reviewed Sep 13, 2020

The course is buggy and thanks to bugs impossible to complete, I have payed 150 dollars so far and I cant complete the spechialization now thanks to black-box and white-box testing week 4 assignment 1.

The staff are unresponsive and they dont answer questions on the discussion forum, the assignments are vague and look like they have been put together in a hurry.

Link to external resources for the course has been hijacked for months and it leaads to malicious websites.

For a course on testing they sure as hell havent tested their own course.

Rakhi

1.0

Reviewed Oct 3, 2021

Do not get trap into this certificate "Software Testing and Automation Specialization" last topic is not available since march 2021, you will end up wasting your money.

This is a fraud.

Marcela

1.0

Reviewed Dec 26, 2020

There is not support of the teachers, the material is old because now we have Java 14 and some configurations doesn't work.

Gitesh

2.0

Reviewed Oct 22, 2023

Pros 1. Came to know about new test techniques 2. Good explanation and working of Code Coverage Metric: MC/DC 3. Good explanation for Code Coverage Metric: OMC/DC and why it is used Cons 1. No working example of Mutation testing was provided 2. Partition Testing was explained in the most complex way ever 3. Lecture notes/slides are not provided 4. The techniques provided are highly restrictive in nature and apply only to those programs or software code which are based on numbers. In modern day, not all code pertains to numbers and there is lot of code for User Interface. The course failed in every possible way to provide a way to test UI and apply a suitable technique for UI tests 5. No real life exaamles used for applying test techniques 6. How to generate test cases using Automated software? 7. Although mentioned in the slide, no reference links were provided for OMC/DC tagging semantics 8. The course mentioned couple of IEEE (Research) Papers, but none were provided in the resources for further study. Unfortunately, these papers are not freely available for one to refer 9. Softwares' used to help with OMC/DC 10. Can BDD be used for Designing User Stories for Backend systems?

Budi

4.0

Reviewed Sep 16, 2021

Very good & well constructed course material, especially the introduction to Gherkin language part. The only thing needs improvement is the automated assignment validation, it does not provide sufficient information for the learner to debug

Ana

1.0

Reviewed Jul 25, 2025

M1: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M10: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M2: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M3: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M4: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M5: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M6: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M7: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M8: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** M9: -0.05 *** Learner did not properly terminate mutant version! *** correct: -0.5 Learner did not properly verify correct version! Very outdated course.

Art

1.0

Reviewed Aug 13, 2024

The last two exercises were explained very poorly. They didn't provide the correct version of the program, making it difficult to understand how it works or what to expect in the test. There is no help available from the course creators, only from other students. I've seen questions in the forum that are 2 or 4 years old and still unanswered. The export function for the example program doesn't work. I spent a week trying to export it before giving up and creating a new empty one to copy everything over.

Del

1.0

Reviewed Jan 31, 2025

One of the worst courses I've ever taken, you don't learn, most of the assignments are poorly explained. It's horrible, I don't recommend it.

Jean

5.0

Reviewed Feb 20, 2022

Great course, covering important theoretical foundations. I really appreciate Dr Whalen's teaching, because he goes in depth into the topics. I also enjoyed his parts in the previous course of this specialization. Hope to see more of his materials.

5.0

Reviewed Nov 18, 2021

Course is very interesting but, i think there are some problem in the system where it graded automatically. Same file i submitted repeatedly but got different comments. Anyway, the course was very exciting and mindstorming.

Haresh

5.0

Reviewed Jul 15, 2024

I'm an university student. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the lecturers, University and Coursera. This course is amazing.

ismael

5.0

Reviewed Oct 3, 2023

muy recomendado buen conocimiento impartido.

Bhuvana

5.0

Reviewed Jan 4, 2023

Great experience with Coursera!