Should black box or white box testing be the emphasis for testers?

Question

Which type of testing would you say should be the emphasis (for testers/QAs), and why?

A quick set of definitions from wikipedia:

Black box testing

Answer 1

"Both" has been stated above, and is the obvious answer...but IMO, white box testing goes far beyond developer unit testing (althoughI suppose it could depend on where you draw the line between white and black). For example, code coverage analysis is a common white box approach - i.e. run some scenarios or tests, and examine the results looking for holes in testing. Even if unit tests have 100% cc, measuring cc on common user scenarios can reveal code that may potentially need even more testing.

Another place where white box testing helps is examining data types, constants and other information to look for boundaries, special values, etc. For example, if an application has an input that takes a numeric input, a bb only approach could require the tester to "guess" at what values would be good for testing, whereas a wb approach may reveal that all values between 1-256 are treated one way, while larger values are treated another way...and perhaps the number 42 has yet another code path.

So, to answer the original question - both bb and wb are essential for good testing.