I'm working on developing a Facebook application that accesses the user's friends list.
Since some can have thousands of friends, what's the best method to simulate this?
I want to performance test before letting it out in the wild.
Does Facebook have any sandbox account where one can create dummy accounts?
Facebook have recently implemented a feature allowing you to add up to 50 test users, it's probably not enough users to reliably test though:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/
Why not ask a couple of users with lots of friends to beta test for you?
Related
This question, or very similar has been asked before - but I think FB has changed their developer console since.
I'm developing an FB app and would like to test it internally with staff - around 500-1000 is the intention.
Is there a limit to how any real test users I can add within the Roles section in the developer console?
Thanks!
According to Facebook Test Users documentation section, you're limited to only 2000 test users per application.
Apps are limited to 2000 Test Users.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/test-users/
I'm doing testing with Facebook and Facebook apps and have run into an issue with the test accounts. When I create a test account (under the app roles) and begin testing the app and the account, it keeps getting banned. To test my app and get all the information I need, I need to upload a bunch of albums to FB, but this keeps causing the account to get blocked. I was under the impression that the whole point of Facebook Test Accounts was that they were cloistered from the rest of FB and were exempt from odd behavior and being blocked. Has anybody else experienced this before? Is there a way to keep my test accounts from getting blocked so that I can actually do the testing I need to do with them?
We have succefully used a bunch of FB accounts for manual and automated testing. Make sure that test users are under your test app. If you think that everything is done in right way, try to contact FB support team for help.
I create a Facebook app that would invite your friends based on their network (college, high school, professional workplace etc). However, I don't want my friends to see the invitations to an app still in development until I submit the app (adding the logo, image, description etc).
Furthermore, I want to be able to test the ability to send more than 50 people, ie, send the first 50, mark them as "sent", send the next batch of 50, etc.
So my question is, how do you test that functionality?
My hypothesis is I could create up to 500 test users and make them all friends with each other. So I could probably test that way.
However, what about people on my team that want to try out that feature with their own (real) accounts? How could you test with a real user's account and not spam your friends before the app is submitted to the App Center?
Thanks for your help!
Your hypothesis is true. This is the way I do it.
You can make as much users as you need... make them friend of each others and try to test with it.
You can set up the credentials (user name / password) of the test users, so you can login in facebook in the machine you like. If you like someone else do the test give it the credentials.
I am software tester working on outsourced projects for many clients.
Frequently, I am required to test Facebook apps just before they go live. Often, the content of the app requires several interactions with other Facebook friends, including pulling of tagged photos and retrieving a user's info.
Most advice suggests that I should be using Facebook test accounts, created by a developer of a specific app. However, due to the complexity of some of the requirements in order to fully test certain apps, a dummy account - pre-filled with 'real' information is much more practical to use. It is clear that if we were to add all of this detail to Facebook test accounts for every new project, we would never get any time to actually test the app.
My company has approximately 20-30 dummy user accounts on Facebook, all of which have a good level of detail including personal info, photos, friend networks etc. These are perfect for testing as they are normal Facebook accounts. We always set option to private to prevent any sensitive material from being seen by the general public.
Over the last moth or more, our dummy user accounts are being systematically wiped out where Facebook is blocking them. Clearly, we cannot re-instate these accounts as we have no ID for the 'dummy' users.
Our aim is to aid the developers to improve the quality of their Facebook apps, and so has no detrimental effect on Facebook as a company or a brand.
Is there any way to achieve our requirements without the constant battle to maintain our dummy accounts?
Login to facebook. Then use /whitehat in the URL. On the left hand side you will get an option to create test accounts.
Test users are the only way to do this without violating Facebook's terms of service.
You can use multiple apps with a Test User, assuming you're not deleting and recreating them between test runs
I am working on an automated test script to create test users and connect them as friends with each other to load test and profile parts of my app.
The test user documentation states a limit of a maximum 500 test users per application.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/
An app can create up to 500 test users to start testing an app. If you exceed the limit of test users you can create for an app you will receive an error.
Anyone else out there ever needed to push past this limit, and how did you achieve testing with communities of users larger than 500? I want to test with users who have between 2000 and 3000 Facebook friends. Yes, such characters are out there in the real world :) Note: as per a comment below it is highly unusual to find users with such large numbers of friend connections. See the comment for a link to stats.
One option which I'm experimenting with is to create multiple apps and "friend" the test users between apps, which seems to be possible. This seems like unnecessary work though.
I'm also considering stubbing the Facebook API with my own local server, but this feels wrong too. There might be libraries for doing this easily?
Since no one has answered this for quite a while, I thought I'd just post the way I solved this for now, in case someone else needs it some day.
Facebook allows you to add and "share" test users between multiple apps for which you are an administrator.
Therefore, I created several extra test Facebook apps for myself, besides the one I am already testing.
Then I added almost 500 test users to each (using the create test user API call).
I then associated some existing "core" test users across all the apps from the original test application (see below for documentation on how to do this) taking the additional apps up to their 500 limit.
Once the "core" users were added across all the test apps, I then made the "core" users friends with all the other users in each test app (this needs to be done within each test app - ie using the access tokens of the additional test app, not the original app).
The final result is that the "core" group from the original app are friends with users from outside the original app, allowing their friend list to grow beyond the artificial testing user limit of 500. So from the original app I now have a collection of core users who can have as many friends as I'm prepared to go to the hassle of creating, in batches just under 500 in size.
There might be an easier way, but that's it for now.
I didn't explore the idea of stubbing the Facebook API - still an interesting idea!
From the documentation:
Adding existing test users to other apps
You can add existing test users to other apps by using the Graph API with the app access token that you're adding the user to.
https://graph.facebook.com/APP_ID/accounts/test-users?
installed=true
&permissions=read_stream
&uid=TEST_USER_ID
&owner_access_token=APP_ACCESS_TOKEN_OWNER
&access_token=APP_ACCESS_TOKEN
&method=post
Parameters:
uid : User id of the existing test user
owner_access_token : App access token of the app used to create the test user
Facebook Test Users Documentation: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/