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
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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

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