Sprinting in Holo Product Development

Leadership & Org Update 11

Topics

A Note about Testing and Integration

Holo Product Development Progress

Exchanges & the Binance Announcement

A Note About Testing and Integration

In our recent updates you may have seen an increased focus on testing. There are many different levels of software testing. There is functional and non-functional testing, unit testing and integration testing, manual and automated testing — and a variety of combined versions of these all leading up to user acceptance testing. As part of our regular development process we incorporate unit testing. These test the function of a specific piece of code separate from other code. However, what we have been focused on more recently, is automated functional testing and automated integration testing.

Automated integration testing is perhaps the most complex type of testing as it represents the tests that are needed when the code from many different applications or repositories is deployed simultaneously to run together. Testing this way ensures that one change in a complex system does not break something elsewhere in the project. As we make changes to the Holo Platform that support scaling up the number of nodes on our network — we need to be able to automate running each change and it’s relevant use cases first on one device and then on multiple devices on the same network.

We are spending precious developer time on testing and release automation because it enables us to code and make changes available to other team members more rapidly. Each time we make a change, instead of manually configuring the application and spinning up the necessary infrastructure to test the change — we can simply run the automated tests.

Holo Product Development Progress

The five 5 major requirements needed for shipping HoloPorts are reiterated below along with high level progress on each.

Networking must support at least 5000 nodes that can communicate with each other and with working apps.

Development on Holochain networking has shifted to our long-term solution, lib3h (https://github.com/holochain/lib3h/), which is the technology that will allow us to begin focusing on the scaling of HoloPort nodes. The production network engine and core can now talk to each other using lib3h. Integrating use of lib3h into a Holochain release is our current goal. More broadly, our plan is to scale and test 10 nodes in the next few sprints, then proceed upward to 50, 100, 500 and so on following that — moving us through the testing waves that will continuously widen the testing community during Closed Alpha. Identity functions must ensure secure and unified identities for users across the Holo Network.

Our teams have been actively working to have DeepKey and Personas work in the context of bridged apps across the Holo Platform. We can now automate the creation, validation, and registration of an agent on a device using the Key Management hApp which allows for automated testing of multiple users. The teams are now focused on the UI for Identity which will have the next set of users be able to test the functionality. HoloPort users must be able to plug into and register on the Holo Network to start providing hosting.

A HoloPort can now be registered and updated in our test environment and we have made steady progress in reliability and user experience with NixOS on the HoloPorts. As we prepare for the new networking protocol to be implemented, our focus is enabling end-to-end integration tests that will let us see this happening simultaneously for various numbers of ports and nodes as we move through the testing waves. A User Interface must be able to connect to a HoloPort from another device and manage their hosting options.

Our early user interface (UI) prototypes were mostly for independent hApps — HoloHosting, HoloFuel, Service Logs, etc. Now we have a unified app designed called HP Admin where we can give visibility to all the settings and management of the HoloPort. We are working now to pull the underlying functionality from those apps into this view. Each sprint (two week cycle) enables more features of this integrated admin UI. Basic versions of the HoloFuel app and a chat app must be available to be hosted on the HoloPort.

We’ve had several prototypes for chat apps working on earlier versions of HoloChain and we’ve aligned on the one that will be included in our release. Further, we have made progress on paying invoices with HoloFuel from the Service Logs App.

While we have distilled our requirements for getting to last wave of Closed Alpha, at which point we ship HoloPorts, down to these 5 main points, each of these has technical dependencies that are not expressed here in detail.

In our Dev Pulse this past Tuesday, we shared team by team details. We will continue to do that every other week creating a synced pattern with our development sprints.

Furthermore, in each Dev Pulse, we continue to dive deeper into various technical aspects of what we are building both for Holochain the open source project — and the Holo Platform — ensuring greater visibility to you and the rest of our community.

Exchanges & the Binance Announcement

BinanceUS

As many of you may have seen, Binance announced last week that it is considering support for 30 digital assets on its BinanceUS marketplace. Several major crypto-currencies including Bitcoin and Ether are being considered along with HOT and 27 other tokens. In this case consideration includes evaluations based under Binance’s Digital Asset Risk Assessment Framework which audits blockchain project in five fundamental areas. We believe that our decision to locate ourselves in Gibraltar and obtain a DLT license will be helpful for addressing these needs and the requirements of other exchanges throughout the world.

Image courtesy of BinanceUS

It is important to note: Holo Token (HOT) is on the BinanceUS potential list of candidate tokens. There has not yet been any form of confirmation. We’ll share more as soon as we are able.

Blockbid

We’re happy to officially announce that we are actively listed on the Australia-based exchange Blockbid, which makes trading available for people around the world including the UK, the US and Australia.

A few things of interest about Blockbid:

Blockbid has registered with Australia’s regulatory financial oversight body AUSTRAC to operate as a digital currency exchange and therefore requires identity verification for accounts. Blockbid has a flat 0.1% trading fee. Blockbid allows direct integration with international bank accounts, however, we would caution you that there may be transfer exchange fees from your bank The UI is very user friendly and intuitive with a separate section for exchange. It is suited for all levels of trading experience According to the website, 95% of all crypto asset deposits are stored in an offline multi-signature hardware vault. Also, the exchange is one of the first to be fully covered by cybersecurity insurance.

As always, we welcome and invite participation at Holo — whether you are a developer, a prospective host, a HOT holder or someone interested in forwarding the creation of a truly distributed Internet. A big thank you goes out to all our volunteers and supporters and everyone committed to building the Next Net.