I have been working on different Telepathy pieces for the last month or two. And have been thinking a lot about how I run and test the different components. One of the first things I did was put together a script based on one in telepathy-glib to start a new session bus dedicated for testing with an alternative service directory. This allows me to use Empathy for communication uninterrupted by testing.
When I was working on Gabble. I had a python test client I would run against it, this meant I had to have two terminal windows open, one for the client, and one for the CM. Last week I started working on Mission Control too, and found myself quickly drowning in open terminal windows and debug output. What I needed badly was a debug log viewer.
There already is a log viewer in Empathy, but I found it tedious to restart it between Empathy runs, and it was missing some basic things like copy/paste, search, and category filtering. So over the weekend I hacked up a quick and dirty UI that does all of the above. Hopefully we could add these features back into the Empathy viewer, and make it possible to run outside of Empathy.
You could grab it from my git repo.