Traditionally the lab controller daemons have had no automated tests (lumped into the "too hard" basket) but we are slowly developing some. As of Beaker 0.12 we have tests covering beaker-proxy and parts of beaker-provision. Beaker-watchdog should be covered by the test suite too. Here is an example of the kinds of regressions which the tests should be able to catch: http://git.beaker-project.org/cgit/beaker/commit/?id=913b112b79eb9013b8efad34e141b5e3e073dee1
I added some tests for beaker-watchdog as part of the fix for bug 962901. That includes a test case which would catch the regression mentioned in comment 0. http://git.beaker-project.org/cgit/beaker/commit/?id=04ca063af8bb014cfbb86bf7ec6c279b3d391ba8