TAP, the Test Anything Protocol, is a simple text-based interface between testing modules or programs and a test harness. The tests (also called “TAP producers” in this context) write test results in a simple format on standard output; a test harness (also called “TAP consumer”) will parse and interpret these results, and properly present them to the user, and/or register them for later analysis. The exact details of how this is accomplished can vary among different test harnesses. The Automake parallel harness will present the results on the console in the usual fashion (see Testsuite progress on console), and will use the .trs files (see Basics of test metadata) to store the test results and related metadata. Apart from that, it will try to remain as much compatible as possible with pre-existing and widespread utilities, such as the prove utility, at least for the simpler usages.
TAP started its life as part of the test harness for Perl, but today it has been (mostly) standardized, and has various independent implementations in different languages; among them, C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, and Java. For a semi-official specification of the TAP protocol, please refer to the documentation of ‘Test::Harness::TAP’.
The most relevant real-world usages of TAP are obviously in the testsuites of perl and of many perl modules. Still, also other important third-party packages, such as git, use TAP in their testsuite.