testrunneragnostic

testrunneragnostic is a design approach in software testing that emphasizes decoupling test definitions from the execution engine. In a testrunneragnostic system, test code is written once and can be executed by multiple test runners or environments without modification. The goal is to enable portability and flexibility across toolchains and platforms.

Key to this approach is an adapter layer or a common contract that describes how tests are discovered, run, and how results are reported. Tests may declare metadata such as suites, tags, and parameters in a language-agnostic way, while runners translate these signals into their native APIs.

Benefits include easier switching between runners in CI pipelines, reduced vendor lock-in, and improved ability to compare test outcomes across tools. It supports polyglot projects and helps standardize reporting by normalizing results to a shared format.

Implementation considerations include selecting a widely supported result format (for example, JUnit XML or a JSON schema), providing robust adapters for each runner, and ensuring consistent handling of setup and teardown, parameterization, and flaky tests. Performance and feature parity across runners can be challenging.

Typical use cases arise in organizations that operate heterogeneous test stacks, seek to migrate gradually between tools, or want to run the same suite in local development and in continuous integration without rewriting tests.

See also test automation, test framework, test harness.