Glossary term: Constellation

The set of Nodes participating in a particular Test Plan Session.

A Constellation’s Nodes have role names, and one application instance is assigned to each role name.

For example, to test whether ActivityPub actors can follow each other, a first actor on a first Node needs to create a Follow activity, and the second actor on the second Node needs to create an Accept activity.

If we wanted to test whether actors on Mastodon can follow Actors on WordPress, we would assign a Mastodon instance in the first role of the Constellation, and WordPress in the second role. If we wanted to test whether actors on WordPress can follow actors on Mastodon, we would keep the test as-is, but assigned WordPress to the role previously played by Mastodon, and vice versa.

With this approach, we can also test whether actors on Mastodon can follow actors on another Mastodon instance: just assign to different Mastodon instances to the two roles.