white box (software engineering) on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
A white box (or glass box, clear box, or open box) is a subsystem whose internals can be viewed but usually not altered. 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 uti ...
, software engineering
Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...
, and in intelligent user interface design, where it is closely related to recent interest in explainable artificial intelligence.
Having access to the subsystem internals in general makes the subsystem easier to understand, but also easier to hack; for example, if a programmer can examine source code, weaknesses in an algorithm are much easier to discover. That makes white-box testing
White-box testing (also known as clear box testing, glass box testing, transparent box testing, and structural testing) is a method of software testing that tests internal structures or workings of an application, as opposed to its functionality ...
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.
The notion of a "Black Box in a Glass Box" was originally used as a metaphor for teaching complex topics to computing novices.
See also
* Black box * Gray-box testingReferences
Software testing {{soft-eng-stub