Russell Bryant has posted details of a new mailing list for automated testing of Asterisk and some information on the progress that has been made. There is no way to say how important I think this work is. It really makes a huge difference to Asterisk and the ability to use it in an enterprise environment. Really great work!

Here's his mail:

Greetings,

A while back, I posted a message about an effort to improve automated testing in the Asterisk project. I wanted to give an update on how that project has progressed for those that have not been following along very closely.

We started using Bamboo as a continuous integration tool, which you can find running at http://bamboo.asterisk.org/. Note that some of the pass/fail statistics on there are a bit skewed, as the Bamboo server was just rebuilt and things were failing as everything was put back together.

A lot of really good automated test cases have been developed, and more are constantly being added. There are currently 85 test cases that run against Asterisk trunk after every change to the code. While some tests are small in scope, many of them cover significant call scenarios, such as various methods of doing transfers and call parking.

I apologize for the previous flood of Bamboo emails to the -dev list. :-) I now have a new mailing list created for those that would like to subscribe to those messages.

http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/test-results

Additionally, one of the latest updates to our Bamboo setup is automated testing code coverage analysis. It will tell us exactly what code ran as a result of our automated test cases. It provides a good metric to start using to help identify areas of Asterisk that are in need of more test cases. You can find the code coverage reports for the latest builds of Asterisk trunk and 1.8 on Linux in the artifacts tab when viewing the details of a build.

http://bamboo.asterisk.org/browse/AST-TRUNK/latest
/images/asterisk.gif
I'm proud of the progress we have made so far and am excited to continue aggressive development of automated test cases for Asterisk. The tests we have are already catching problems on a regular basis. The resulting quality improvements make the job of the development team easier, as well as result in a better experience for end users.

If you're looking for a way to contribute to Asterisk and you are more comfortable writing scripts instead of C code, then the external test suite is a great way to get involved and help out.

Thank you all for your continued support of Asterisk!

Best Regards,

--
Russell Bryant
Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager, Open Source Software

Update: Mark Michelson has posted the following:

<shameless plug>

If you're itching to learn more about the Asterisk test suite and how to get involved in the testing effort, I will be giving a presentation at Astricon in October that will give all the details!

</shameless plug>

If you want to help with the testing effort but are not sure how to start, check out Leif Madsen's blog post about setting up the testsuite here:
http://blogs.asterisk.org/2010/04/29/installing-the-asterisk-test-suite/. Now that 1.8 has entered the beta stage, this is the ideal time to be adding new tests. We want the beta to be all about ironing out new bugs instead of fixing regressions. If we have the tests in place, we can be more sure that we won't be introducing regressions and 1.8 can be both the most feature-rich and stable version of Asterisk yet.

I'm PUMPED!
Mark Michelson

Comments (Click to post)

Name:
Subject:
Website:
Message:

The Asterisk Development Team has announced the release of Asterisk 1.8.0-beta2.

This release is available for immediate download at
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/

All interested users of Asterisk are encouraged to participate in the 1.8 testing process. Please report any issues found to the issue tracker, http://issues.asterisk.org/. It is also very useful to see successful test reports. Please post those to the asterisk-dev mailing list.

Asterisk 1.8 is the next major release series of Asterisk. It will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, similar to Asterisk 1.4. For more information about support time lines for Asterisk releases, see the Asterisk versions page.

http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk-versions

This release contains fixes since the last beta release as reported by the community. Some of the changes include:

• Remove duplicate -c flag when using $(INSTALL)
  (Closes issue #17695. Reported, patched by pabelanger)
  
  
• Don't re-register CDR module on reload.
  (Closes issue #17304. Reported, tested by jnemeth. Patched by tilghman)
  
  
• Don't assume qlog is open.
  (Closes issue #17704. Reported, tested by vrban. Patched by pabelanger)
  
  
• Expand the correct value within AST_OPTION_ONLY.
  (Closes issue #17703. Reported by stuarth. Patched by seanbright)
  
  
• Allow for systems without locale support to be usable.
  (Closes issue #17697. Reported, patched by pprindeville. Tested by mmichelson)
  
  
• Fixes for sounds/Makefile to install on systems using older GNU make.
  (Closes issue #17716. Reported by farisraouf. Patched by tilghman, qwell, seanbright)
  
  
• Update logger.conf.sample to include documentation about new 'fax' logger level.
  (Closes issue #17715. Reported, tested by vrban. Patched by pabelanger)

Asterisk 1.8 contains many new features over previous releases of Asterisk.
A short list of included features includes:

• Secure RTP
  
• IPv6 Support
  
• Connected Party Identification Support
  
• Calendaring Integration
  
• A new call logging system, Channel Event Logging (CEL)
  
• Distributed Device State using Jabber/XMPP PubSub
  
• Call Completion Supplementary Services support
  
• Advice of Charge support
  
• Much, much more!

A full list of new features can be found in the CHANGES file.

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.8/CHANGES?view=checkout

For a full list of changes in the current release, please see the ChangeLog:

http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.8.0-beta2

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

Comments (Click to post)

Name:
Subject:
Website:
Message:

Nir Simionovich has posted details of the beta of the new call analytics service:

Hi All,

I'd like to introduce you to something that we've been working on the past few months now.

Over the course of the past 6 months, we've been working on developing an analytical service for Asterisk based PBX systems. Primarily, currently supporting FreePBX based PBX systems, however, can cater to other variants as well.

So, what is it really about? it's all about your call data and getting an insight to information beyond that of merely CDR records. The humbug project aims at providing a call analytics service, similar to Google Analytics, without you needing to change anything in your dialplan or configuration. Simply insert a small PERL based agent to your Asterisk PBX system, and we'll collect the information directly from the manager port. The agent is fully open sourced, so you can look into it, make sure we don't do anything malicious and simply join in.

As time progresses and more data is accumulated, we'll be launching a call fraud analysis services to accompany the analytical service. The analytical services are totally FREE for you to use. Just go to the humbug website at http://www.humbuglabs.org and register. We'll contact you directly for the agent download. We welcome any critics, advice, code modifications and ideas. If' you've encountered fraud issues with your PBX, we'd love to hear about it, and analyze your case, so we may add it to our fraud signature database.

Asterisk PBX makers who wish to integrate humbug services into their offering are welcome to do so - just let us know, so we'll know who does what and where :-)

Kind Regards,
Nir Simionovich
The Humbug Project

Comments (Click to post)

Name:
Subject:
Website:
Message:

Russell Bryant has posted details of some changes to the way developers need to commit code to Asterisk because of the newly released 1.8 branch:

Greetings,

The Asterisk 1.8 branch has been created. (Yay!)

As a related change to this, there have been some changes to the process of merging changes between branches. The merge order is now:

1.4 --> 1.6.2 --> 1.8 --> trunk

So, the 1.6.2 branch has the following properties:

branch-1.4-merged
branch-1.4-blocked

The 1.8 branch has:

branch-1.6.2-merged
branch-1.6.2-blocked

... etc.

Other than the order of the branches in the merge process (and the corresponding property names), the usage of the svnmerge tool for merging between branches remains the same.

Thanks,

--
Russell Bryant
Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager, Open Source Software

Comments (Click to post)

Name:
Subject:
Website:
Message:

The Asterisk Development Team has announced the release of Asterisk 1.8.0-beta1. This release marks the beginning of the testing process for the eventual release of Asterisk 1.8.0.

This release is available for immediate download at http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/

All interested users of Asterisk are encouraged to participate in the 1.8 testing process. Please report any issues found to the issue tracker, http://issues.asterisk.org/. It is also very useful to hear successful test reports. Please post those to the asterisk-dev mailing list.

Asterisk 1.8 is the next major release series of Asterisk. It will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, similar to Asterisk 1.4. For more information about support time lines for Asterisk releases, see the Asterisk versions page.

http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk-versions

Asterisk 1.8 contains many new features over previous releases of Asterisk.

A short list of included features includes:

• Secure RTP
  
• IPv6 Support
  
• Connected Party Identification Support
  
• Calendaring Integration
  
• A new call logging system, Channel Event Logging (CEL)
  
• Distributed Device State using Jabber/XMPP PubSub
  
• Call Completion Supplementary Services support
  
• Advice of Charge support
  
• Much, much more!

A full list of new features can be found in the CHANGES file.

For a full list of changes in the current release, please see the ChangeLog

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

Comments (1 posted)

Written by sles (July 27, 2010, 9:33 am)

No T38-T30 gateway? :-(

Name:
Subject:
Website:
Message: