[Testing TF] First Meet-Up 18Oct, 15:00UTC

Dear SocialCG:

I would like to put an event on the SocialCG calendar, and invite to it 
all interested parties[^1] reading this. The event will be a "meet-up" 
of the Testing Task Force, with two invited guests. It will be held at 
3pm UTC [^2] on Wednesday, 18 October in the recording-friendly[^3] this 
jitsi room:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/socialcg

For our first meeting, I wanted to hear from longtime fediverse 
community dev @Helge, who leads the Bovine project and is working on 
testing tooling in the codeberg project `funfedidev` [^4]. As with all 
invited guests, I would also like to hear in detail what issues and 
merge-requests Helge would appreciate in the short term and in the 
medium term, as he continues to build out his set of tools, hopefully 
with significant help, inspiration, and review from the rest of us.

In the second half of the hour, I wanted @Helge to share his 
experiences, challenges, and successes translating specified behaviors 
(both AP behaviors, FEP behaviors, and other specs from other sources) 
into plain-language test-cases, a great example of which you can see 
here [^5]. @Bengo also wanted to share some ideas for systematically 
identifying which of the AP spec's behaviors[^6] are easier and harder 
to design plain-language test-cases for; in future meetings, these 
criteria may help us jump into each other's git repositories 
constructively, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of 
complementary approaches.

People have been asking in various places and private messages whether 
the Task Force has a gameplan, a timeline, a roadmap, a leaderboard. I 
wanted to assure people that I have none of those things, and that I see 
my role purely as "convener" of a productive exchange between 
independent projects in the community, whether funded or unfunded[^7]. I 
am not here to convince anyone (or be convinced by anyone) of the 
**best** way to test ActivityPub, or its adjacent specs and extensions. 
Nor am I interested in helping the W3C pick **one official** test suite, 
although I do hope to capture helpful feedback on the ambiguities and 
weak spots of all the specs the CG defines and profiles in the process. 
My primary goal for this task force is to support and promote helpful 
testing work in the open source and in the CG's interest, and to provide 
a platform for people to help each other achieve "rough consensus and 
running code" on multiple different kinds of testing tools that test 
whatever they want to test. Please message me if you think those goals 
are not being met by these meetings and related async channels[^8], or 
if you think you could help us keep the sync and async work productive.

Sorry for the magnum opus, but most of this can be moved into a primer 
once this task force has a repo somewhere!

Conveniently yours,
__@bumblefudge

----------
[^1]: Note that this is a meeting of the Social CG and thus is operated 
within the W3C's IP policies, so if you would like to participate or 
make any contributions (even offhand opinions!) that could remotely be 
considered "intellectual property," please officially join the CG before 
the meeting by creating a w3c.org account and using it to join the 
Social CG by clicking "join" at https://www.w3.org/community/SocialCG/ . 
If you cannot join the CG for any reason, still feel invited to attend, 
but err on the side of silence if you're not sure where your IP boundary is.
[^2]: That's 8am PST, 11am EST, 5pm CEST this time of year.
[^3]: For meetings of this task force, I would propose the capacity to 
record be made available to all guests who *prefer* to have their demos 
and presentations recorded, with no pressure on those who prefer the 
opposite. Q&A needs not be recorded and can be more conventionally 
scribed as the group decides; anyone attending who is uncomfortable 
being recorded is encouraged to request recording be paused or stopped 
before speaking, or use jitsi chat instead.
[^4]: https://helge.codeberg.page/funfedidev/
[^5]: 
https://codeberg.org/helge/fediverse-features/src/branch/main/w3c/ap_follow.feature
[^6]: https://socialweb.coop/activitypub/behaviors/
[^7]: I am, full disclosure, contributing to one set of testing 
implements; here is a little background on that project's philosophy for 
the curious: https://socialweb.coop/blog/additive-testing/
[^8]: @activitypubtestsuite@venera.social is worth following for 
announcements and codeberg/gitlab/etc links!

Received on Monday, 9 October 2023 16:50:13 UTC