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.