MCP Dev Summit North America

As the MCP specification evolves, so do the subtle behavioral differences between implementations that undermine the protocol's core promise: compatibility without coordination. How do you ensure a client built with the Python SDK behaves identically to one built with TypeScript, C#, or Go?

This talk introduces MCP's conformance testing infrastructure. Real SDK implementations run against scenarios that analyze their behavior and assess conformance. Each scenario exercises a specific protocol interaction from OAuth flows and Client ID Metadata Documents to resource metadata discovery, verifying that every SDK handles it correctly.

I'll cover how we built this, what we found when we ran it across SDKs, and how it's changed the way we develop and ship spec changes. You'll learn how conformance testing prevents entire categories of bugs, accelerates code generation of new implementations, increases security guarantees by simulating attacks, and enables evidence-based SDK tiering. I'll also cover how you can get involved: writing new scenarios, running tests against implementations, and helping close the gap between spec and reality.