Rashmi Konda

Title: Testing MQTT messages – where hardware meets software

Abstract: In recent times, the Internet of Things has gained a lot of momentum in terms of bringing many complex applications into the market where seamless integration of both hardware and software is the need of the hour. With such types of products in the IoT ecosystem, it becomes imperative for the QA team to come with an effective test strategy to meet the quality goal. One unique thing we come across here is too many protocols to test like MQTT, XMPP, CoAP etc. The traditional testing approach may need additional dedicated focus areas here to get maximum test coverage. There is a difference between how protocols like MQTT vs Rest work. So testing a IOT platform needs a combination of different technologies and protocol specific test strategy and tools. In this presentation, we will discuss the basics of MQTT protocol messaging structure and provide a generic testing approach. MQTT brokers handle the task of data transmission between different clients. We will be using real time use cases and come up with the test scenarios and automation testing guidelines.

Firstly, we are going to understand why MQTT is used in most of the IoT based applications while comparing with the other available protocols. With this understanding we will get into the details of MQTT Architecture and the message format which helps the QA to come up with vivid test scenarios at the message payload, headers etc.

We shall build the testing Strategy by considering a real time use case which is very relevant in our current situation. For example: An IoT device TempGun which captures the temperature of every student entering the University will be sent to the IoT hub on to the Cloud or to a mobile App which sends notifications/alerts to the concerned volunteers when the temperature of a person goes above the normal range. For this use case, we shall provide the detailed testing strategy in terms of how to construct a test message, what are the configuration parameters, how to establish connections to a MQTT Broker etc. We will consider both functional validations and also on non-functional requirements like reliability, scalability of the broker. For demo we will be using some of the open sourced tools from HiveMQ product family to simulate, validate the messages from different publishers to subscribers.

Outline/Structure of the Talk:
1. What is MQTT and how does it fit into the IOT world? – 5 mins
2. MQTT Architecture & message structure – 5 mins
3. Testing scenarios and approach for MQTT payload- 10 mins
4. Demo – 5 mins
5. Q&A – 5 mins

Learning Outcome:
The audience will be able to understand the basics of MQTT and get an overview of how to test the same using an IOT usecase.

Demo details:
We will be presenting a demo on how to test a few of the common scenarios in the MQTT world using Java/HiveMQ libraries.

Target Audience:
Test engineers with basic knowledge of apis.