From our weekly discussion:
The goal is to easily mock a real tree and test/verify its execution logic. There were a couple of methods proposed for this:

• Create blackboard analogs to our EPICS-communication-enabled tree items. Alternately: refactor our items to be more one-to-one with the blackboard items.
  • When mocking a tree, we could swap out EPICS-items with Blackboard-items and easily track the variables
  • This might result in us being unsure if the conversion was truly accurate, and was ranked lowest)
• Programmatically stand up a caproto IOC, after scraping all PV instances from items in the tree, then run the tree against that IOC
  • We could isolate communication by using a different port than the normal CA communication
  • We can scrape our controls system to initialize this caproto IOC
• Inject blackboard communication by monkeypatching caget/caput
  • snazzy, fun

All of this is important long term, but w.r.t an MVP is maybe of a lower priority