Write a Tradefed test runner

This page describes how to write a new test runner in Tradefed.

Background

If you are curious about the place of test runners in the Tradefed architecture, see Structure of a Test Runner.

This is not a prerequisite to writing a new test runner; test runners can be written in isolation.

Bare minimum: Implement the interface

The bare minimum to qualify as a Tradefed test runner is to implement the IRemoteTest interface and more specifically the run(TestInformation testInfo, ITestInvocationListener listener) method.

This method is the one invoked by the harness when using the test runner, similar to a Java Runnable.

Every part of that method is considered part of the test runner execution.

Report results from the test runner

The run method in the base interface give access to a listener object of type ITestInvocationListener. This object is the key to reporting structured results from the test runner to the harness.

By reporting structured results, a test runner has the following properties:

  • Report a proper list of all the tests that ran, how long they took and if they individually passed, failed or some other states.
  • Report metrics associated with the tests if applicable, for example installation-time metrics.
  • Fit in most of the infrastructure tooling, for example display results and metrics, etc.
  • Usually easier to debug since there is a more granular trace of the execution.

That said, reporting structured results is optional; a test runner might simply want to assess the state of the entire run as PASSED or FAILED without any details of the actual execution.

The following events can be called on the listener to notify the harness of the current progress of executions:

  • testRunStarted: Notify the beginning of a group of test cases that are related together.
    • testStarted: Notify the beginning of a test case starting.
    • testFailed/testIgnored: Notify the change of state of the test case in progress. A test case without any change of state is considered passed.
    • testEnded: Notify the end of the test case.
  • testRunFailed: Notify that the overall status of the group of test cases execution is a failure. A test run can be a pass or a fail independently of the test cases results depending on what the execution was expecting. For example, a binary running several test cases could report all pass test cases but with an error exit code (for any reasons: leaked files, etc.).
  • testRunEnded: Notify the end of the group of test cases.

Maintaining and ensuring the proper order of the callbacks is the responsibility of the test runner implementer, for example ensuring that testRunEnded is called in case of exception using a finally clause.

Test cases callbacks (testStarted, testEnded, etc.) are optional. A test run might occur without any test cases.

You might notice that this structure of events is inspired from typical JUnit structure. This is on purpose to keep things close to something basic that developers usually have knowledge about.

Report logs from the test runner

If you are writing your own Tradefed test class or runner, you will implement IRemoteTest and get a ITestInvocationListener through the run() method. This listener can be used to log files as follows:

    listener.testLog(String dataName, LogDataType type_of_data, InputStreamSource data);

Test with a device

The minimum interface above allows to run very simple tests that are isolated and do not require any particular resources, for example Java unit tests.

Test writers who want to go to the next step of device testing will need the following interfaces:

  • IDeviceTest allows to receive the ITestDevice object that represents the device under test and provides the API to interact with it.
  • IBuildReceiver allows the test to get the IBuildInfo object created at the build provider step containing all the information and artifacts related to the test setup.

Test runners are usually interested in these interfaces in order to get artifacts related to the execution, for example extra files, and get the device under test that will be targeted during the execution.

Test with multiple devices

Tradefed supports running tests on multiple devices at the same time. This is useful when testing components that require an external interaction, like a phone and a watch pairing.

In order to write a test runner that can use multiple devices, you will need to implement the IMultiDeviceTest, which will allow to receive a map of ITestDevice to IBuildInfo that contains the full list of device representations and their associated build information.

The setter from the interface will always be called before the run method, so it's safe to assume that the structure will be available when run is called.

Tests aware of their setups

Some test runner implementations might need information about the overall setup in order to work properly, for example some metadata about the invocation, or which target_preparer ran before, etc.

In order to achieve this, a test runner can access the IConfiguration object it is part of and that it's executed in. See the configuration object description for more details.

For the test runner implementation, you will need to implement the IConfigurationReceiver to receive the IConfiguration object.

Flexible test runner

Test runners can provide a flexible way of running their tests if they have a granular control over them, for example a JUnit tests runner can individually run each unit test.

This allows the larger harness and infrastructure to leverage that fine control and users to run partially the test runner via filtering.

Filtering support is described in the ITestFilterReceiver interface, which allows to receive sets of include and exclude filters for the tests that should or should not run.

Our convention is that a test will be run IFF it matches one or more of the include filters AND does not match any of the exclude filters. If no include filters are given, all tests should be run as long as they do not match any of the exclude filters.