This feature is for developers, really, but other users will benefit as well if plugins are more stable and compliant with future versions change of pimatic. Right now, there are no automated tests for plugins. It would be really helpful to provide the tools for plugin developers to write proper tests for their stuff.
The Test Driver should be a more-or-less a stripped down Pimatic core
- which can be run on the fly as part of an unit test framework,
- which provides an API to execute actions and register all kinds of event handlers
- which provides integration points for other test functions, e.g. a handler to inject and validate rules, a variable validator, a log filter and such.
It is for further discussion whether or not tests require the actual hardware devices in place or some mock-up needs to be developed to simulate the hardware. Mock-up development can be a difficult exercise and it is probably too hard to simulate every this and that of the hardware. However, I believe, having some tests to cover a subset of the functionality are still better than no tests!