1<!-- 2 Copyright 2011 The Android Open Source Project 3 4 Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); 5 you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. 6 You may obtain a copy of the License at 7 8 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 9 10 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software 11 distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, 12 WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. 13 See the License for the specific language governing permissions and 14 limitations under the License. 15--> 16 17# Trade Federation Overview # 18 19TradeFederation (tradefed or TF for short) is a continuous test framework designed for running tests 20on Android devices. Its a Java application which runs on a host computer, and communicates to one or 21more Android devices using ddmlib (the library behind DDMS) over adb. 22 23## Features 24 25- modular, flexible design 26- has built in support for running many different types of Android tests: instrumentation, native/gtest, host-based JUnit, etc 27- provides reliability and recovery mechanism on top of adb 28- supports scheduling and running tests on multiple devices in parallel 29 30## Fundamentals 31The lifecycle of a test executed using TradeFederation is composed of four separate stages, designed 32around formally defined interfaces. 33 34- [Build provider](bp.html): Provides a build to test, downloading appropriate files if necessary 35- [Target preparer](tp.html): Prepares the test environment, e.g. software installation and setup 36- [Test](test.html): Executes test(s) and gathers test results 37- [Result reporter](result.html): Listens for test results, usually for the purpose of forwarding 38 test results to a repository 39 40The fundamental entity in TradeFederation is a Configuration. A Configuration is an XML file that 41declares the lifecycle components of a test. 42 43This separation of the test's lifecycle is intended to allow for reuse. Using this design, you can 44create a Test, and then different Configurations to run it in different environments. For example, 45you could create a Configuration that will run a test on your local machine, and dump the result to 46stdout. You could then create a second Configuration that would execute that same test, but use a 47different Result reporter to store the test results in a database. 48 49### Additional components of a configuration 50 51- [Device recovery](recovery.html): mechanism to recover device communication if lost 52- [Logger](logger.html): collects tradefed logging data 53 54A complete TradeFederation test execution, across its entire lifecycle, is referred to as an 55Invocation. 56