The pattern test framework does not provide many attributes that end-users would use to write tests. The framework is intended to be extended by components and libraries that define the test syntax and other facilities.

For example, a Test-Driven framework would augment the base framework with a syntax based around test fixtures, test methods and assertions. A Behavior-Driven framework would instead use a syntax based around contexts and specifications. Both frameworks would share the common attribute-based model provided by the pattern test framework. They may even interoperate to a large extent.

Other add-on libraries and tools may further contribute functionality to the pattern test framework by registering components with the runtime or by subclassing pattern attributes.

Gallio supports the use of multiple test frameworks. The pattern test framework model defined here may not be appropriate for all purposes. Therefore you may consider creating a new test framework from scratch by implementing ITestFramework and ITestDriver appropriately to obtain the desired semantics.

The name of the Pattern Test Framework derives from the similarity between the recursive construction process performed by IPattern and the kind of pattern matching that is performed by a recursive descent parser. Each primary IPattern can be thought of as a grammar rule that matches a given code element and describes how further matching of nested code elements is intended to occur. The actual matching performed is somewhat simplistic (largely based on attribute lookup) but on the whole the framework provides a quite flexible implementation pattern for a wide variety of testing features.