Network UPS Tools
Power Devices support

Recognizing the critical nature of NUT, the NUT Quality Assurance (NQA) effort has been established to improve NUT where necessary, and to maintain software quality as high as it should be.

NQA is present in many aspects and areas of NUT.

Documentation

The documentation toolchain now use AsciiDoc to output both HTML pages and manual pages (troff).

  • the NUT website and HTML documentation are tested for W3C XHTML 1.1 and CSS compliance

  • the manual pages conformance is tested with doclifter

Source code

Use of standards

NUT promotes and uses many standards, like:

  • the variable names standard used in NUT,

  • the coding rules and best practices for developers,

  • the use of a software architecture limiting developments to the very minimum,

  • the use of standard Free and OpenSource Software components, like:

    • the USB library,

    • the Net SNMP project,

    • the Neon library,

    • the OpenSSL library (to be replaced by NSS, which is more license compliant with NUT and is FIPS 140 certified),

    • the TCP Wrappers library.

QA tools and metrics

NUT’s quality is constently monitored using many tools, like:

  • a Revision Control System (Subversion) to track development and ease regression fixes. Any modification on the NUT source trees are reported on the NUT Commits mailing list.

  • Buildbot to automate the compile/test cycle. Any build failure is caught early, reported through the NUT Commits mailing list, and fixed quickly.

  • a project portal with trackers for bugs, feature request, patchs and tasks

NUT QA also relies on external tools, like:

  • the Debian QA tools, available through the NUT Package Tracking System:

    • Lintian general QA checks,

    • piuparts automates the installation, upgrade and removal testing processes.

  • a runtime testing suite, which automates the inter layer communication testing (driver - upsd - upsmon / clients), that is part of Ubuntu. The NUT testing script is available in the Ubuntu QA Regression Testing suite. It installs nut, configure with for the dummy-ups driver, changes a few data and check that these are well propagated with upsc.

Runtime quality