Combining Black Box Testing with White Box Code Analysis: A Heterogeneous Approach for Testing Enterprise SaaS Applications

Faulty enterprise applications may be producing incorrect outputs or performing below service expectations due to code vulnerabilities that do not show up in standard code analyzers (e.g., CAST [1]). A tester can figure out such functionality or performance issues by black box functional testing and fault injection. Then based on the specific test scenario, targeted white box code analysis can be done to figure out the code errors causing the application functionality or performance issue. In this paper, we use such a heterogeneous testing approach that combines black box testing with white box code analysis for testing an enterprise licensing application (ELA). We describe experiments designed to uncover functionality and performance issues in ELA and then explore the corresponding code errors causing the issues. We find that our approach is effective in faster detection and fixing of application performance and functionality errors than simple white box code analysis.