A Test can be thought of as a declarative artifact that describes about what a test "looks like" from the outside based on available reflective metadata. A TestStep is then the runtime counterpart of a Test that is created to describe different parameter bindigns or other characteristics of a test's structure that become manifest only at runtime.

A test may depend on one or more other tests. When a test fails, the tests that depend on it are also automatically considered failures. Moreover, the test harness ensures that a test will only run once all of its dependencies have completed execution successfully. A run-time error will occur when the system detects the presence of circular test dependencies or attempts to execute a test concurrently with its dependencies.

A test contain child tests. The children of a test are executed in dependency order within the scope of the parent test. Thus the parent test may setup/teardown the execution environment used to execute its children. Tests that belong to different subtrees are executed in relative isolation within the common environment established by their common parent.

The object model distinguishes between tests that represent individual test cases and other test containers. Test containers are skipped if they do not contain any test cases or if none of their test cases have been selected for execution.

The kind of type type of test is set to Group by default.