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A white box (or glass box, clear box, or open box) is a subsystem whose internals can be viewed but usually not altered.Patrick J. Driscoll, "Systems Thinking," in Gregory S. Parnell, Patrick J. Driscoll, and Dale L. Henderson (eds.), ''Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management'', 2nd. ed., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011, 40. The term is used in 
systems engineering
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their enterprise life cycle, life cycles. At its core, systems engineering util ...
as well as in software engineering
Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development.
A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...
.
Having access to the subsystem internals in general makes the subsystem easier to understand, but also easier to hack
Hack may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Games
* ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game
* ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack''
Music
* ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...
; for example, if a programmer can examine source code, weaknesses in an algorithm are much easier to discover. That makes white-box testing much more effective than black-box testing but considerably more difficult from the sophistication needed on the part of the tester to understand the subsystem.
See also
* Black box * White-box cryptography * White-box testingReferences
Software testing {{soft-eng-stub