This is obviously an old question, so there s a good chance that when the original answers were posted here that Asterisk did not support unit / integration testing to the extent that it does today (although the Unit Test Framework API went in on 12/22/09, so that, at least, did exist).

The unit testing framework (David s e-mail from the dev list here) lets you execute unit tests directly within Asterisk. Tests are registered with the framework and can be executed / viewed through the CLI. Since this is all part of Asterisk, the tests are compiled into the executable. You do have to configure Asterisk with the --enable-dev-mode option, and mark the tests for compilation using the menuselect tool (some applications, like app_voicemail, automatically register tests - but they re the minority).

Writing unit tests is fairly straight-forward - and while it (obviously) isn t as fully featured as a commercial unit test framework, it gets the job done and can be enhanced as needed.

That most likely isn t what the majority of Asterisk users are going to want to use - although Asterisk developers are highly encouraged to check it out. Both users and developers are probably interested in integration tests, which the Asterisk Test Suite provides. At its core, the Test Suite is a python script that executes other scripts - be they lua, python, etc. The Test Suite comes with a set of python and lua libraries that help to orchestrate and execute multiple Asterisk instances. Test writers can use third party applications such as SIPp or Asterisk interfaces (AMI, AGI) or a combination thereof to test the hosted Asterisk instance(s).

There are close to 200 tests now in the Test Suite, with more being added on a fairly regular basis. You could obviously write your own tests that exercise your Asterisk configuration and have them managed by the Test Suite - if they re generic enough, you could submit them for inclusion in the Test Suite as well.

Note that the Test Suite can be a bit tricky to set up - Leif wrote a good blog post on setting up the Test Suite here.

Well, it depends on what you are testing. There are a lot of ways to handle this sort of thing. My preference is to use Asterisk Call Files bundled with dialplan code. EG: Create a callfile to dial some public number, once it is answered, hop back to the specified dialplan context and perform all of my testing logic (play soundfiles, listen for keypresses, etc.)

I wrote an Asterisk call file library which makes this sort of testing EXTREMELY easy. It has a lot of documentation / examples too, check it out here: http://pycall.org/. That may help you.

Good luck!

You could create a set of specific scenarios and use Asterisk s MixMonitor command to record these calls. This would enable you to establish a set of sound recordings that were normative for your system for these tests, and use an automated sound file comparison tool (Perhaps something from comparing-sound-files-if-not-completely-identical?) to examine the results. Just an idea.

Unit testing as opposed to integration testing means your code is supposed to be architectured so the logic itself is insulated from external dependencies. You said "the configuration file is as much a programming language as anything else" but that s the thing --- real languages has not just control flow but abstraction capabilities, which allow you to write the logic in a way that can be unit tested. That s why I keep logic outside of asterisk as much as possible.

For integration testing, script linphonec to drive your application, and grep the asterisk console to see what it s doing. You can use docker, and fire up temporary asterisk instances for each test.