Common Test is a portable application for automated testing. It is suitable for black-box testing of target systems of any type (i.e. not necessarily implemented in Erlang), as well as for white-box testing of Erlang/OTP programs. Black-box testing is performed via standard O&M interfaces (such as SNMP, HTTP, Corba, Telnet, etc) and, if required, via user specific interfaces (often called test ports). White-box testing of Erlang/OTP programs is easily accomplished by calling the target API functions directly from the test case functions. Common Test also integrates usage of the OTP cover tool for code coverage analysis of Erlang/OTP programs.

Common Test executes test suite programs automatically, without operator interaction. Test progress and results is printed to logs on HTML format, easily browsed with a standard web browser. Common Test also sends notifications about progress and results via an OTP event manager to event handlers plugged in to the system. This way users can integrate their own programs for e.g. logging, database storing or supervision with Common Test.

Common Test provides libraries that contain useful support functions to fill various testing needs and requirements. There is for example support for flexible test declarations by means of so called test specifications. There is also support for central configuration and control of multiple independent test sessions (towards different target systems) running in parallel.

Common Test is implemented as a framework based on the OTP Test Server application.