Birthday Greetings

As you’re a very friendly person, you would like to send a birthday note to all the friends you have. But you have a lot of friends and a bit lazy, it may take some times to write all the notes by hand.

The good news is that computers can do it automatically for you.

Imagine you have a flat file with all your friends :

 last_name, first_name, date_of_birth, email
 Doe, John, 1982/10/08, john.doe@foobar.com
 Ann, Mary, 1975/09/11, mary.ann@foobar.com

And you want to send them a happy birthday email on their birth date :

 Subject: Happy birthday!

 Happy birthday, dear <first_name>!

How would this software look like ? Try to implement it so you can easily change :

• the way you retrieve the friends data (for instance, try switching to a SQLite Db)
• the way you send the note : (for instance, imagine you want to send SMS instead of emails)

What kind of tests would you write ? Would you use Mocks ?

Additional Features

• Friends born on February, 29th should have their Birthday greeted on February, 28th

• Send a Birthday Reminder note when it is someone else birthday :

      Subject: Birthday Reminder
  
      Dear <first_name>,
  
      Today is <someone_else_first_name> <someone_else_last_name>'s birthday.
      Don't forget to send him a message !
  

• Send a single Birthday Reminder note

      Subject: Birthday Reminder
  
      Dear <first_name>,
  
      Today is <full_name_1>, <full_name_2> and <full_name_3>'s birthday.
      Don't forget to send them a message !
  

Origin

This kata is largely inspired by the work of Matteo Vaccari in http://matteo.vaccari.name/blog/archives/154