Last week, I had to upgrade an old project from Swift 3. The Xcode migrator tool upgraded automatically all the codebase, without any issue. Yet, when running the app, I noticed a small problem: the layout of a particular screen was completely screwed.

LLDB, which stands for Low Level Debugger, is the default debugger in Xcode and a powerful ally when it comes to inspecting and analyzing the program state in a controlled environment. Engineers can better understand how the program behaves, isolate and reproduce troublesome pathways, make assumptions and apply hypothesis. All of this, on-the-fly, without the burden of having to recompile.

Currently, when I want to test a part of an app involving a remote notification, I only have one choice: using a real device and the Apple Push Notification service (APNs). To send a notification, we need an APNs device token, which is a globally unique token that identifies a device to APNs.

This week, I’ve been working on improving the code coverage of an iOS application. One of the scenarios I’ve been testing involved an enum, with a handful of cases. Eager to maximise my coverage, I created several test functions to cover them all. Unfortunately, during this process, I’ve made a mistake, leading to a crash of my application when running these new tests.

During our iOS debugging sessions, we have to search though infinite stack traces, hopefully to find some evidence. We all do this. But on some occasions, we may stumble upon some cryptic strings like, looking like this.