There were a of presentations, discussions and generically good vibes about the open social web and ActivityPub at FOSDEM, the open-source conference in Brussels, Belgium, this past weekend. I gave a FediTest presentation at the FOSDEM Social Web After Hours at Hackerspace Brussels. In spite of it being rather late, there were lots of good questions and quite some interest in testing and FediTest in particular. Somebody learned about FediTest in this talk, ran FediTest against their own imple...| Blog on FediTest
I will give an update about the FediTest project to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Social Web Community Group’s Testing Task Force: Thursday, November 21, 2024, 10am pacific time Online, using Jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/socialcg-testing Draft subjects to cover: The various problems that need(ed) solving to make FediTest work Updated FediTest architecture and approach Protocol vs system tests Demo Remaining challenges and planned approach Putting FediTest to work with more applications an...| Blog on FediTest
Every year, seagl.org, the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, takes place in Seattle. I had the opportunity to present our work with FediTest in an hour-long session Saturday morning. This was a more general technical audience, not particularly focused on the social web and the Fediverse: almost everybody had heard of the Fediverse, but very few hands went up when I asked who could explain how it works, technically. So I spent a bit more time talking about what the various involved protocols do an...| Blog on FediTest
We released FediTest V0.4 yesterday, which is a significant step forward towards making FediTest more useful when testing Fediverse implementations in the real world. The journey has been longer and more time-consuming than we(*) expected. I thought I outline a few reasons why. We first thought we could build FediTest on top of the PyUnit unit testing framework. It does a lot of things already that we wanted FediTest to do, like discovering tests and producing reports etc. We figured that we ...| Blog on FediTest
FediForum is an unconference “for the people who move the Fediverse forward”. It took place for the fourth time September 12-14, 2024, online. (Disclaimer: I’m an organizer.) Naturally, I ran a session on FediTest there. Steve Bate was there as well. We had a number of Fediverse developers there, including Ryan Barrett and Jesse Karmani. (There were others but following FediForum conventions, I don’t want to publish their names as they didn’t add their names to the public attendee l...| Blog on FediTest
Organized again by the Internet Archive, DWebCamp this year brought together over 500 technologists, rights advocates, activists, artists, entrepreneurs, social and otherwise, and many more, for 3+ days of conference and unconference under the California Redwoods. Redwoods, tents and laptops in the same setting? Slide presentations and marshmallows? Apparently it works! I had the opportunity to run a workshop on FediTest, and the larger question of how can we ever ensure the quality of large-...| Blog on FediTest
As FediTest progresses, some questions are emerging, and the right answers aren’t entirely obvious. In this post, I list some of the questions and attempt to answer them. This is a draft, and everything is very tentative: we are looking for feedback and are happy to decide otherwise if somebody’s reasoning is better than our own. Will the FediTest project regularly run tests and publish the results? We have no current plans to do so. Reasoning: The percentage of tests that we can fully au...| Blog on FediTest
We covered FediTest (with demo!) in a session at Internet Identity Workshop IIW38 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, today. I made a new slide with the FediTest architecture which I think is better than what I had before. I think it communicates more clearly how it works.| Blog on FediTest
Warning Development has moved on since this blog post. Go to Quickstart for current information. If you are interested in running basically the same thing that was shown in the recent FediTest show and tell, here is how you do that. There are many disclaimers, as this is early work. It doesn’t really test much. The focus of this early(est) release is to let you play with the approach we are taking, so we can get feedback as early as possible and build something that might actually be useful...| Blog on FediTest
We did a few rounds of early show-and-tell, including: this session in a meeting of the Fediverse Developer Network; this session at FediForum; and a few one-on-one sessions with potential users. The main points of feedback were: Ah, interesting, is it done yet? Comment: I take this as something positive :-) You are doing something complicated (supporting several nodes in a server constellation). Can’t you start by doing something simpler, such as simply running a few curl commands against ...| Blog on FediTest
Update: the recording of the meeting and some notes are now online here on the FediDevs.org site. Some good questions and discussion. We seem to be going in roughly the right direction based on feedback, so we’ll charge on!! Release early and often, they say. For some complex projects with complex requirements, it’s also useful to show-and-tell early and often, and get direct, verbal feedback as soon as possible. FediTest is one of them. Next week Thursday, we are planning to do exactly t...| Blog on FediTest
To create the Fediverse Test Suite, we need a number of components: 1. The actual tests For example, we want to test that: An actor file has the right format. An actor can follow another actor on another server, and their “following” and “follower” collections are updated accordingly. The content of a “note” post does not get mangled when transmitted from one server to another server running different software. Each of those needs to have code that exercises the server(s) under te...| Blog on FediTest
Let’s start with the term Test Suite. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it: In software development, a test suite, … is a collection of test cases that are intended to be used to test a software program to show that it has some specified set of behaviors. About Test Case, it says: … a test case is a specification of the inputs, execution conditions, testing procedure, and expected results that define a single test to be executed to achieve a particular software testing objective, ...| Blog on FediTest
The W3C’s Social Community Group – shepherd of the ActivityPub and ActivityStreams standards – has a Testing Task Force. It had a meeting today, and I showed these slides, figured I put them here, too. (These are work in progress, and more notes than “presentation” slides, my apologies for the lack of prettiness.) First, on user stories. Like for all systems, it is useful to consider who we write a Fediverse test suite for, and what they are trying to accomplish with it. In this sli...| Blog on FediTest
Need for a Fediverse Test suite? ✔ Check. Basics of a plan? Right here! ✔ Check. Funding? Secured! Thanks NLNet! ✔ Check. So, Hello World, let’s get this project started! We will be hosting periodic community meetings to demo what we are building, discuss project progress, and get community feedback. So far, we have not scheduled one because we are just starting and don’t have anything to show yet. To find out when meetings are scheduled, follow @feditest@mastodon.social or periodic...| Blog on FediTest
Note| FediTest
For today’s meetup, here are some materials.| FediTest