Summary

It's been a long chapter. Dynamic black-box testing covers a lot of ground. For new testers, this may be the single most important chapter in the book. It's likely that at your interviews or your first day on the job you'll be given software and asked to test it. Applying this chapter's techniques is a sure way to immediately find bugs.

Don't assume, though, that this is all there is to software testing. If it was, you could stop reading right now and ignore the remaining chapters. Dynamic black-box testing will just get you in the door. There's so much more to software testing, and you're just getting started.

The next two chapters introduce you to software testing when you have access to the code and can see how it works and what it does on the lowest levels. The same black-box techniques are still valid, but you'll be able to complement them with new techniques that will help you become an even more effective software tester.