[asterisk-dev] About asterisk development plans

[Matthew Nicholson]

On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 10:16 -0500, John Lange wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 10:44 -0400, Mihai Balea wrote:
> > As far as I know, there is no test harness, so it's not surprising  
> > that regressions pop up as often as they do.
> 
> I think this is the most important point. There should be a test bench
> that automatically confirms every (supported) feature is working before
> it's released. If the process was automated then it shouldn't take that
> long to run the tests.
> 
> Obviously there would be a significant amount of work to get it setup
> the first time but after that, by definition, there shouldn't be changes
> required to test a stable branch.
> 
> I'm picturing two Asterisk boxes with a combination of FXO, FXS, and PRI
> cards along with sip client testing software (sipp).
> 

So, I figured I should mention that I started work on a Lua based
automated testing solution for asterisk a few months back.  Work has
stalled on it for now, but it is intended to eventually perform the kind
of tests being discussed here.  Right now it is about 10% or 15% of the
way to actually being useful for testing asterisk.  Currently about all
it can do is run tests (in the form of Lua scripts) and tally the
results.  It can also test itself.

My plan was to eventually teach it how to spawn one or more asterisk
processes, each with their own configurations, and control them via a
combination of the manager interface and a custom chan_test.so module
(which I have not even started work on).  The chan_test.so module would
basically be like an enhanced version of chan_local that executes a Lua
script instead of the dialplan.  This would give it access to internal
asterisk API's and also allow much more functionality than dialplan
scripting provides.  chan_test would be used to generate dtmf tones,
read and generate audio, pretend to be a user working their way through
an IVR, etc.

The code can be found in this branch:
http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/team/mnicholson/asttest

-- 
Matthew Nicholson
Digium, Inc. | Software Developer