Hello everyone! This blog post is about my CS-443 class. Today I will be talking about a very important topic: white vs black! Me personally I love white. It is my favorite and it is clean. Hmm but why are we talking about colors in a software class?! Hmmm….wait a second! We are not talking about colors here, we are talking about testing methods, white and black box. The first time I came across with these two terms was about 6-7 months ago at my work. One of our software testing engineers was giving a presentation about different methods of testing we could use, and white and black testing was part of them. I remember I was researching about these terms after the presentation.

White and black box are two testing methods used in software testing. Both very different methods, but very important.

White box testing is a detailed testing method of the code, logic and structure. In order to perform white box testing the code should be visible to the tester. The tester needs to look inside the source code and figure out what is not working right or what can be improved for more efficiency. Like every other thing in the world these two methods have advantages and disadvantages. Some of the advantages of white box testing method are: It makes it easier for the tester to determine the easiest way of testing and where the code might break; The tester can determine easily which lines are not needed to improve the code efficiency; The tester can provide maximum code coverage. A disadvantage of the white box testing I would mention is that it requires debugging and analyzers tools.

On the other hand, black box testing is the complete opposite of white box testing. In this method the tester doesn’t have any information or knowledge of the source code and the internal structure. The only way of testing using this method is to put random inputs and examine and compare the outputs with what is excepted. In addition, the tester doesn’t have any knowledge how the input is worked upon. Even though this type of testing sound pretty hard to work with, it has its own advantages. The advantages of this testing method are: It is very efficient for large/extremely large amount of code, it would be a waste of time to keep looking at the code; It separates the user’s perspective from developer’s perspective. Some of the disadvantages of this testing method are: Blind coverage; difficulty in designing the tests; limited coverage.

I liked to explain the difference between these two types of testing methods as a lot of people seem confused. To be honest I have heard a lot of people who say that the black box testing is not good to use. I just wanted to say that is depends a lot in the type of testing you are asked to perform. If you are asked to match the outputs with the excepted output, there is really no need to have the code. Of course, it is always great to have access to the source code as a reference, but if we talk about big companies you might want to think it twice about using white box testing.

Hello everyone! This is my first CS blog post so let’s cross the bridge and get to know more about Software. In this first blog post I will be writing about design patterns and in particular about the Bridge, the bridge design pattern of course!! What were you thinking?!

To start with, I want to talk a bit about design patterns, what are and how important are they. A design pattern is simply a solution of an occurring problem in software design. Think of a design pattern as a template that will help you to solve your problem. How important are they? VERY!

If you have a problem, what are you going to do about it if you don’t have a solution!? Once you get to know the most important design patterns, you will be able to understand which one to use just by understanding the problem well. But what is the damage of choosing the wrong design pattern? Actually, it is a pretty big problem to have the wrong design pattern to fit for your problem. Having the wrong design pattern will bring you to a very complex solution and if you are working with other people it will be very hard for them to understand your solution or even might give them a wrong understanding of it. BIG PROBLEM!

In class of CS 343 we have talked about some of the most important design patterns used and here I will talked about another one. The Bridge Design Pattern is introduced by the Gang Of Four and is used in software to encapsulate an implementation class inside an interface class.  The Bridge design patters helps solving problems: when abstraction and implementation should be defined and extended independently; when the implementation needs to be selected at run time by avoiding a compile time binding between an abstraction and implementation. Some other advantages of The Bridge are that it can be used to map orthogonal class hierarchies and is designed up front to let the abstraction and implementation be independently of each other. The Bridge Design Pattern is a composite of the Template and Strategy design patterns.

It is considered that the Bridge Design Pattern is very similar with the Adapter design pattern. The biggest difference is that the Adapter Design Pattern is used to convert the interface between classes with less inheritance, but the Bridge Design Pattern decouple an abstraction class from its implementation.

The reason why I choose to talk about this design pattern is that I found it interesting to know about a similar design of Adapter Design.  Software engineers face different problems all the time and it is good to know about different type of design patterns in order to have the perfect solution for a problem.

Resources and example of Bridge Design Pattern:
1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/bridge-design-pattern/