You use PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to configure application infrastructure. To perform unit and integration testing of the DSC configuration before deployment, which tool should you use?

The Pester test framework is the correct choice because it is a widely used, open-source testing framework for PowerShell. It allows you to write unit and integration tests for PowerShell code, including DSC configurations, ensuring they behave as expected before deployment. Pester can validate resource properties, configuration application, and overall state. PSScriptAnalyzer is a static code analyzer that checks for best practices and style violations, but it doesn't execute tests against the configuration's behavior. PSCodeHealth is a module for reporting on code quality metrics, not for functional testing. The Test-DscConfiguration cmdlet is used to check if a system's current state matches a DSC configuration, but it's a runtime check on a target system, not a testing framework for pre-deployment validation.