TCF is a system that simplifies the creation and execution of test cases (automation, for that matter) with minimal setup effort by engineers (SW, QA and release) and :ref:`autobuilders/CI <tcf_ci>` alike across a wide amount of hardware platforms. It is distributed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.
The test framework provides means to:
- Discover and run one or many unit, integration, end-to-end automated test cases or samples with a single command line; these test cases may need no target (run in the local host) or one or more targets on which to operate.
- Locate, manage and share target hardware to maximize resource efficiency
A developer will create a feature and as part of that will create unit test cases which will be executed while developing the features until the feature is complete. Other engineers (eg: QA) might create more unit tests, integration and end-to-end tests to validate different features working together. Testcase metadata added to the test cases indicates how to build it, where can it be run and how to determine if it is succesful or not, or how to extract significant data (like resource consumption, performance, etc) for postprocessing. These test cases can then be commited as part of the code so that other people/agents can run them. The testcase can request targets, power them up/down, connect/disconnect things to/from it, etc
When is time to run the testcases, a developer, QA engineer, or CI/automation system launches tcf, which locates them, locates remote targets where to execute them them, builds and evaluate them, parallelizing as much as possible and generating reports about the execution.
The system consists of two parts:
- tcf: the client and test runner; this command line utility it is used to manage the test targets exported by the test target brokers (servers) and to execute test cases on said targets.
- ttbd: the server; this manages test targets connected to them, serving as a proxy to the test cases being run by tcf on behalf of users.
TCF focuses only on execution, leaving reporting, coverage analysis, etc, to other tools, providing means to feed data into them. It is designed with the goal of having a small footprint and little dependencies.
Report issues and contact the authors by filling issues in https://github.com/intel/tcf/issues.
Visit the quickstart instructions.
Available at http://intel.github.io/tcf
Best practices for contributing available at the guide.