Test Driver for Pimatic Plugins

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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!

Fully agree. There are some common errors that could be easily avoided by better test support:

• Function that should return promises (of ActionHandlers, Devices, …) do not return promises.
• Aattribute getter, that do not return the actual attribute value or the event is not emitted on attribute update
• Devices do not restore the lastState given in the createDevice callback.

Some plugins have unit test, but writing good unit tests without a “test driver” is not really possible, if you don’t know the pitfalls already.

@mwittig Are you interested in developing such a test driver? I want to focus mainly on stability first before integrating new features. So this could be a good start for further stabilization.

@sweetpi Yes, generally, I am happy to work on this, but as this is leisure time work it is probably too much work for a single developer. It is also questionable if plugin developers will fancy the test driver and will be ready to go the extra mile to developer test cases for their plugin. I would like to see more feedback on this from the @Developer group!!!

Ofcause I would help. Maybe we should go a step further and enforce the developer to pass some basic tests, before a plugin gets into the official plugin listing.

I’m also very interested in an environment for plugin development. I want to improve the mysensors-plugin and would like to write some unit tests.

I wanted to use the unit tests from other plugins as base for my unit tests. Unfortunately I’m not able to run the unit tests from other plugins on my local machine (as described in this post http://forum.pimatic.org/topic/509/how-to-run-develop-unit-tests-for-a-plugin).

Can anyone help me how to easily get a “framework-dummy” and how to get the unit tests running?

Cheers,
Maurus

@TheRaspyDev Thanks for upvoting. I am currently in the process of reviewing existing test code (see also http://forum.pimatic.org/topic/509/how-to-run-develop-unit-tests-for-a-plugin/3).