Testing services, while not difficult, can be substantially more elaborate than the relatively basic unit testing that's been shown up to this point. Each point in the general hms_sys data flow from an Artisan to the Gateway, for example, has specific and individual testing concerns, but the flow as a whole should, ideally, be as well, so that an end-to-end process verification can be performed on demand.
The end-to-end flow could be pictured like this:
From start to finish, a test plan for this data flow would need to address, at a minimum, the following:
- Creating the message-data in a fashion that it could be used to verify the process at its end
- Creating the DaemonMessage (though probably not testing that it was created accurately—there should already be unit tests that take care of testing that)
- Sending the resulting message...