In computer programming and software engineering, black box testing is used to check that the output of a program is as expected given certain inputs. The term black box is used because the actual program being executed is not examined.
A technique in black box testing is equivalence partitioning. Equivalence partitioning is designed to minimize the number of test cases by dividing tests into such a way that the system is expected to act the same way for all tests of each equivalence partition. Test inputs would be selected from each partition.
Equivalence partitions are designed so that every possible input belongs to one and only one equivalence partition.
Disadvantages to Equivalence partitions
- Doesn't test every input
- No guidelines for choosing inputs
- Heuristic-based
