Test Harness

Definitions

1. The infrastructure code that surrounds and drives a test suite — handling test discovery, execution orchestration, environment setup and teardown, result collection, and reporting — as distinct from the individual test cases themselves.

   In plain English: The behind-the-scenes setup code that prepares everything needed to run tests and collects the results afterward.

   Example: "The test harness spins up a Docker Compose stack, seeds the database, runs the suite, then tears everything down and posts results to Slack."

Related Terms

• CI
• E2E Testing
• Integration Testing
• Matrix Build
• End-to-End Test
• Regression Test
• System Test
• Test Framework
• Testing Pyramid