I think testing things like connections, caches, etc are outside the scope of unit testing. What you probably want to unit test is how your code handles a malfo

I think testing things like connections, caches, etc are outside the scope of unit testing. What you probably want to unit test is how your code handles a malformed NICK command in an IRC connection, or random input, not the entire connection as a whole. You write unit tests for these handlers and when that's done, you can write scripts that are grander in scope and nature. They can build and tear down connections, or perhaps drop it in semi-random intervals. As far as I know, unit tests are made to test fairly small-scale blocks of code and bigger frameworks and scripts can test whole subsystems.