Black-box view

A black-box view is an architecture view of a building block that hides its internal structure, respecting the information hiding principle. It conveys only two things about the building block: its public interfaces, and the responsibility or objective those interfaces exist to fulfil. Internal structure and implementation detail are deliberately excluded.

A black box may also declare quality attributes it satisfies, such as timing behavior, throughput, or security aspects, without saying how it satisfies them. This is what distinguishes a black-box view from a white-box view, which opens the box up to show the structure inside – typically the concern of that same building block’s own building block view, one level down.