Beautiful Testing

Automated Interoperability Testing

By using unit tests to test our protocols in isolation (without a real network connection to an XMPP server), we were able to test all corner cases of a protocol while keeping our tests clean, simple, fast, and reliable. However, an XMPP client doesn’t live in isolation; its purpose is to eventually connect to a real XMPP server and talk to real clients. Testing an XMPP client in the real world is important for several reasons. First of all, it allows you to check the functionality of your application at a larger scale than the local unit testing, ensuring that all the components work together correctly. Second, by communicating with other XMPP protocol implementations, you can test whether your interpretation of the protocol specification is correct. Finally, by testing your client against many different XMPP implementations, you are able to ensure interoperability with a wide collection of XMPP software. Unless you are developing a dedicated client to connect to only one specific server, testing interoperability with other clients and servers is very important in an open, heterogeneous network such as XMPP.

Because IM clients are driven by a user interface, testing interoperability between two clients is typically done manually: both clients are started, they connect to a server, an operation is triggered through the user interface of one client, and the other client is checked to determine whether it responds correctly to the operation. Fully ...