N.B.: This section describes a feature which is still stabilizing. Although we believe that Autotest is useful as-is, this documentation describes an interface which might change in the future: do not depend upon Autotest without subscribing to the Autoconf mailing lists.
It is paradoxical that portable projects depend on nonportable tools to run their test suite. Autoconf by itself is the paragon of this problem: although it aims at perfectly portability, up to 2.13 its test suite was using DejaGNU, a rich and complex testing framework, but which is far from being standard on Posix systems. Worse yet, it was likely to be missing on the most fragile platforms, the very platforms that are most likely to torture Autoconf and exhibit deficiencies.
To circumvent this problem, many package maintainers have developed their own testing framework, based on simple shell scripts whose sole outputs are exit status values describing whether the test succeeded. Most of these tests share common patterns, and this can result in lots of duplicated code and tedious maintenance.
Following exactly the same reasoning that yielded to the inception of Autoconf, Autotest provides a test suite generation framework, based on M4 macros building a portable shell script. The suite itself is equipped with automatic logging and tracing facilities which greatly diminish the interaction with bug reporters, and simple timing reports.
Autoconf itself has been using Autotest for years, and we do attest that it has considerably improved the strength of the test suite and the quality of bug reports. Other projects are known to use some generation of Autotest, such as Bison, GNU Wdiff, GNU Tar, each of them with different needs, and this usage has validated Autotest as a general testing framework.
Nonetheless, compared to DejaGNU, Autotest is inadequate for interactive tool testing, which is probably its main limitation.