So, I'm a few baby steps closer to having a test environment for the work I'm doing with RT (the awesome Request Tracker software from Jesse and his bunch of misfit geniuses over at bestpractical.com) I'm not hacking on the code of RT directly, so my testing requirements aren't much aligned with those of the core developers or extension authors (who do make excellent use of the amazing variety of Perl testing frameworks and modules), so I been futzing around at it educationally and I thought it was time to share.

( Exposition, explanations )

Here's what I have going so far for this:

mime_lite.pl : tiny Perl script using MIME:Lite from CPAN to generate full emails as text files

a development install of RT 3.8.6 on my workstation, configured with : ./configure --with-my-user-group --enable-layout=inplace --with-db-type=SQLite --with-devel-mode

which configuration¹ simplifies a lot of things and enables more debug information

run with RT's standalone_httpd on a local high port

configured to send mail to /bin/cat >> mail.out instead of sendmail

injecting mail into RT just like a live system would, eg rt-mailgate -queue General --url http://127.0.0.1:8888 < nursemail.txt

using tail to watch the logs as I poke things

Although I've been testing and breaking software my whole life I am still quite new to the craft of software testing and the concepts behind professional QA. In particular there is no innovation (yet) in what I am doing, but the tools of Unix are proving quite helpful and I'm happy with my progress so far.

¹: That configuration script is not from the excellent but dated book RT Essentials, or the wiki, but from some of Jesse's slides from a boot camp that turned up in Google's cache.