The Asterisk Test Suite is a way of developing external tests to Asterisk in order to test for functionality differences between different versions of Asterisk. By creating automated tests you are able to verify functionality you depend on remains undisturbed by changes in the code base. Tests you write can even be submitted back to the Asterisk project in order for them to be included directly in the test suite where the automated testing framework can execute the tests so developers will be alerted if a change they make causes a test to fail.

In order to write these tests we need to be able to run the test suite on our development machine (typically a virtual machine or some other box which you won’t be using for production). We’ll be installing the test suite on an Ubuntu Server 9.10 along with the dependencies, then running the automated tests. Writing automated tests though is beyond the scope of this document. See the README.txt file in the testsuite/ directory for more information (http://svn.asterisk.org/svn/testsuite/asterisk/trunk/README.txt).

We’ll be starting with a fresh, minimal install of Ubuntu Server 9.10, so once you’ve gotten that installed, feel free to move on.

Installing Dependencies

Before we get started building the test suite, we need to install the dependencies it requires. The following applications are necessary to run all the currently developed tests, but additional dependencies surely will be required in the future. The current list of dependencies is available in the README.txt file within the testsuite/ repository (referenced earlier). Don’t worry about installing all these dependencies now, because we’re going to step through all the applications you need to install throughout the post.

• SIPp
• python >= 2.4
• python-yaml
• bash
• asttest
• StarPy
• python-twisted

Read the rest of this entry »