Testing SMS code

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Posted in For Developers / Technical, PledgeBank

Today I’m expanding the test harness to thoroughly test out all the SMS code. Adding in SMS creates all sorts of edge cases to check out, and indeed quite a few common cases. For example, it needs to make a pledge with both SMS and email signers, and test SMS conversion to email. And do both failure and success for all those cases. It gets even more complicated when you allow for SMS delivery reports.

To do this, I’ve got small bits of script which pretend to be C360, our SMS aggregator. This is much cheaper than using real SMS messages every time I run the test script 🙂 The pretend scripts talk C360’s API, and fake telling our scripts as if incoming SMS messages arrive. They also store up outgoing SMS from our scripts, and check all the correct messages have been sent out to users.

At the moment Chris is making some crazy Perl stuff to override the time() function in the SMS daemon, so when the test harness fakes the advance of time, it notices.

If I get bored of all this, I’ll tidy up and test the new comments code Chris started the other day.

4 Comments

  1. Francis

    I surf around the blogs and dropped in out of the blue.
    However i notice your mentioning of SMS > email which sounds great!
    Are you developing such an interface?

    It will be wonderful if there’s such a functionality.
    Could you let me know a bit more? or where to get the project info?

    I am not a programmer, but am working in HongKong on public independent web-radio projects.

    Look forward to your successes.

    rgds

    Ben
    WM6471.net

  2. Francis Irving

    Ah, by “SMS conversion to email” we don’t mean a general purpose interface. We mean for the website we’re developing (http://www.pledgebank.com) when someone signs up by SMS, so they can change their subscription to an email one.

  3. Well, you could try our SMS API which could be integrated with Excel or outlook with the capability to deliver Text messages to 489 networks in 182 countries

  4. Sorry for what seems to be shameless self-promotion, but our API provides a ‘simulation mode’ to let you tweak your application for free as well as a validation process the prevents you from wasting money on highly invalid messages.

    Anyhow, good luck with your project.