The Avocado instrumented lifecycle

The Avocado instrumented test goes through multiple phases during its execution. This page describes in detail each of those phases and overall lifecycle of instrumented test execution.

INIT:

This is the initialization state of test. Each test is created in this state. During the initialization, the test attributes are set, environment variables are created, and test skip conditions are evaluated.

SETUP:

The test is in this state when Test.setUp() method is being executed.

TEST:

During this state, the actual test is running.

TEARDOWN:

During this state, the Test.tearDown() method is being executed to make clean up after testing.

FINISHED:

This state is the end of the test’s lifecycle, and the test is in this state when the testing and clean up is finished. during this phase, the test results are reported to runner and the testing is finished.

The whole Test lifecycle is represented by diagram:

                +--------+
                |        |
                |  INIT  +------------+
                |        |            |
                +----+---+            |
                     |                |
                     |                |
                 Test|initialized     |
                     |                |
                     |            Test|skipped
                +----v----+           |
                |         |           |
                |  SETUP  +-----------+---+
                |         |           |   |
                +----+----+           |   |
                     |                |   |
                     |                |   |
                 Test|set up          |   |
                     |                |   |
                     |                |   |
                +----v---+            |   |
                |        |            |   |
    +-----------+  TEST  <------------+   |
    |           |        |                |
    |           +----+---+           Setup|timed out
    |                |                    |
    |     Test finished or timed out      |
    |                |                    |
    |                |                    |
    |         +------v-----+              |
    |         |            |              |
Test|skipped   |  TEARDOWN  <-------------+
    |         |            |
    |         +------+-----+
    |                |
    |                |
    | Teardown finished or timed out
    |                |
    |                |
    |         +------v-----+
    |         |            |
    +--------->  FINISHED  |
              |            |
              +------------+

Timeouts

The avocado instrumented tests can be affected by three types of timeouts. Test timeout, Task timeout and Job timeout. All of these timeouts behaves the same from the point of view of Test’s lifecycle, but the lifecycle will change base on in which state the timeout was reached. Here is a description of different Test’s lifecycles based on the interruptions:

Timeout in SETUP

INIT -> SETUP(interrupted) -> TEARDOWN -> FINISHED (ERROR)

Timeout in TEST

INIT -> SETUP -> TEST(interrupted) -> TEARDOWN -> FINISHED (INTERRUPTED)

Timeout in TEARDOWN

INIT -> SETUP -> TEST -> TEARDOWN(interrupted) -> FINISHED (ERROR)

Note

If either the Task or Job timeout is reached after some other interruption (test or task timeouts) the test is killed in the phase where it is (probably TEARDOWN), and it won’t properly finish.