[asterisk-dev] About asterisk development plans

[Leif Madsen]

Peter Beckman wrote:
> Several people on this thread have mentioned being afraid of using the
> latest "stable" release.  I too have this fear, and run an older version of
> Asterisk and refuse to upgrade, not knowing what changes to the code might
> have been made that will break my existing system.
> 
> I regularly have a call with another friend who runs Asterisk in
> production, and he constantly gripes about how upgrading broke this and how
> a seemingly harmless change to the code broke a whole slew of other things.
> 
> I don't really have a lot of choice to move to another platform though, and
> honestly I'm not sure changing would solve the problem.  But it is clear
> that regression testing, feature testing, and automated testing is
> something that would greatly improve the consistency and REAL and perceived
> stability of asterisk.

You and your friend don't have a set of test boxes and a set of tests you run to 
make sure all the features you're supporting work correctly? When I was working 
for an ITSP, we had a set of test documents that we walked through prior to each 
upgrade to make sure that all the standard sets of features we needed to support 
worked.

I do this now with another call centre that I work with. When we do an upgrade, 
we have a set of tests we run through prior to installing into our production 
system.

I think too many people blindly update their production systems without any 
prior testing on their own part, then proceed to complain when they upgrade to 
the latest release that something broke. We have release candidates prior to 
each release that could potentially be fixed prior to the full release.

I realize that not everyone can test every release candidate, and that not every 
single issue can be tested and resolved prior to the release, but if blind 
transfers, or call parking, or call pickup is extremely important to your 
corporation, then you should be finding those issues prior to upgrading your 
production system.

Leif Madsen.