Somehow, we need to rewrite everything to be nicely testable. To create tests

• choose a test framework (unittest/nosetest/pytest)
• create a folder with some tests
• make travis execute the tests and fail if they fail
• for a new version: ship the folder of the module with example and the tests together in the source code - we want to be able to run the tests in production systems.
• to test and to mock:
  • millisenconds time.sleep
  • changing the execution of the thread
  • the logging
  • multithreading: mock it: split the loop into a loop and an update function.
  • ...

The testing can be an excellent basis to transform and refactor the module.
These are many steps. If you help with one of them or you would like to add some, feel welcome to comment.