The mission of the Arquillian project is to provide a simple test harness that developers can use to produce a broad range of integration tests for their Java applications (most likely enterprise applications). A test case may be executed within the container, deployed alongside the code under test, or by coordinating with the container, acting as a client to the deployed code.

To avoid introducing unnecessary complexity into the developer's build environment, Arquillian integrates transparently with familiar testing frameworks (e.g., JUnit 4, TestNG 5), allowing tests to be launched using existing IDE, Ant and Maven test plugins without any add-ons.