Beautiful Testing

Chapter 7. Beautiful XMPP Testing

Remko Tronçon

At my first job interview, one of the interviewers asked me if I knew what “unit testing” was and whether I had used it before. Although I had been developing an XMPP-based instant messaging (IM) client for years, I had to admit that I only vaguely knew what unit testing was, and that I hardly did any automated testing at all. I had a perfectly good reason, though: since XMPP clients are all about XML data, networks, and user interaction, they don’t lend themselves well to any form of automated testing. A few months after the interview, the experience of working in an agile environment made me realize how weak that excuse was. It took only a couple of months more to discover how beautiful tests could be, especially in environments such as XMPP, where you would least expect them to be.

Introduction

The eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open, XML-based networking protocol for real-time communication. Only a decade after starting out as an instant messaging solution under the name Jabber, XMPP is today being applied in a broad variety of applications, much beyond instant messaging. These applications include social networking, multimedia interaction (such as voice and video), micro-blogging, gaming, and much more.

In this chapter, I will try to share my enthusiasm about testing in the XMPP world, and more specifically in the Swift IM client. Swift is only one of the many XMPP implementations out there, and may ...