Advantages and disadvantages of Grey box testing

Grey box testing is the combination of both White box testing and Black box testing method. In white box testing, testers are aware of the internal structure of code where as in black box testing testers aren't aware of the internal structure.

Grey box testing is a technique to test the application with having a limited knowledge of the internal workings of an application. To test the Web Services application usually the Grey box testing is used. Grey box testing is performed by end-users and also by testers and developers.

Suppose you have Drupal website that contain links. During testing if an error arises while clicking that link then you can make any changes in the HTML code and check further. So in this case user is performing white box testing by changing the code and black box testing by testing on front end.

Advantages

• Grey box testing offers combined benefit of both White box testing as well as Black box testing.
• Grey box testers rely on interface definition and functional specifications instead of source code.
• Grey-box testers can design excellent test scenarios around communication protocols and data type handling due to limited information available.
• The testing will be performed from the user point of view instead of designer.
• Testing is done on the basis of high-level database diagrams and data flow diagrams.

Disadvantages

• The ability to go over the code and test coverage is limited. Since the access to source code is not available.
• The tests can be redundant if the software designer has already run a test case.
• Testing every possible input stream is unrealistic because it would take an unreasonable amount of time; therefore, many program paths will go untested.
• Not suited for algorithm testing.