We have a test framework exercising the core quite well, actually. The plugins is another issue. The coverage is sporadic.

Plugins are organized in , and should be tested by, groups. A group is as of now a python file and some shell tests.

A simple plugin test framework could be fed by a fixture with a prebuilt package (to save some time), and then
- run all tests, verifying the they don't crash or give meaningless output
like test_R_checks
- compare the outcome from some named tests with a table of correct results.

All this could basically be table-driven.