Using a service is definitely easy to test. Services are injected, and in a test either a real service can be used or it can be mocked.

Events can be tested. In unit testing controllers, they usually are instantiated. For testing events on $rootScope, it must be injected into the test.

Testing $rootScope against the existence of some arbitrary models is testable, but sharing data through $rootScope is not considered a good practice.

For testing direct communication between controllers, the expected results should probably be mocked. Otherwise, controllers would need to be manually instantiated to have the right context.