Abuild is integrated with the QTest test framework. The QTest framework is a perl-based test framework intended to support a design for testability testing mentality. Abuild's own test suite is implemented using QTest. When using either the make or the Groovy backends, if a directory called qtest exists, then the test and check targets will invoke qtest-driver to run qtest-based test suites. If a single file with the .testcov extension exists in the build item directory, abuild will invoke qtest-driver so that it can find the test coverage file and activate test coverage support. Note that abuild runs qtest-driver from the output directory, so the coverage output files as well as qtest.log and qtest-results.xml will appear in that directory. If you wish to have a qtest-based test suite be runnable on multiple platforms simultaneously, it's best to avoid creating temporary files in the qtest directory. If you wish to use the abuild output directory for your temporary files, you can retrieve the full path to this directory by calling the get_start_dir method of the qtest TestDriver object.

In order to use test coverage, you must add source files to the TC_SRCS variable in your Abuild.mk or Abuild.groovy file. Abuild automatically exports this into the environment. If you wish to specify a specific set of tests to run using the TESTS environment variable, you can pass it to abuild on the command line as a variable definition (as in abuild check TESTS=some-test), and abuild will automatically export it to the environment for qtest.