nut/docs/nut-qa.txt

NUT Quality Assurance
=====================

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
link:http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/[AsciiDoc] to output both HTML pages and
manual pages (troff). This single point of control permitted to fill many gaps,
to suppress many redundancies and to optimize documentation management in
general.
 
- the NUT website and HTML documentation are tested for W3C XHTML 1.1 and CSS
compliance. This can be counter verified by clicking the W3C XHTML 1.1 and CSS
icons, at the bottom of each page.

- the manual pages conformance is tested with
link:http://catb.org/~esr/doclifter/index.html[doclifter] (outdated)

- Documentation source files are spell checked, using
link:http://aspell.net[Aspell], both interactively (using
'make spellcheck-interactive') and automatically in Buildbot (using
'make spellcheck').

NOTE: A NUT dictionnary is also available (docs/nut.dict), providing a glossary
of terms related to power devices and management.

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 (link:http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/nut[Subversion]) to
track development and ease regression fixes. Any modification on the NUT source
trees are reported on the link:http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/nut-commits[NUT Commits]
mailing list.
- link:http://buildbot.networkupstools.org/public/nut/[Buildbot] to automate the compile/test
cycle. Any build failure is caught early, reported through the
link:http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/nut-commits[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:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
FIXME (POST):
- integrate static code analysis
	- consider splint, Frama-C, BLAST and Clang, and choose one.
	- integrate link:http://scan.coverity.com[Coverity Scan] program.
	Note: request made by Arnaud to scan-admin@coverity.com on Sep 24 2009
- point other distro BTS (use Launchpad as an aggregator?!)

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


- the Debian QA tools, available through the link:http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nut.html[NUT Package Tracking System]:

   * Lintian general QA checks,
   * link:http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/source/n/nut.html[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.
link:http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-bugcontrol/qa-regression-testing/master/view/head:/scripts/test-nut.py[The NUT testing script]
is available in the link:https://code.edge.launchpad.net/qa-regression-testing[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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- NUT provides many link:user-manual.html#NUT_Security[security features] to
ensure a maximum runtime security level.

- Packages use several link:http://wiki.debian.org/Hardening[Hardening methods]
to protect NUT binaries.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
FIXME (POST):

- write a code conformance checker (nut-lint)
- write a § on driver maintainance status
- consider using [http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?opensuse OpenSUSE Build Service tools]
- provide software metrics and evolution over the time

  * [http://www.flossmetrics.org/ FlossMetrics]
  * [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_metric Wikipedia]
  * [http://cccc.sourceforge.net/ CCCC - C and C++ Code Counter]
  * [http://open.ncsu.edu/se/tutorials/metrics/ Metrics with Eclipse]

- Code documentation, for the core architecture (client and drivers are already
documented)

  * [http://doxygen.org/ Doxygen]
  * [http://naturaldocs.org/ NaturalDocs]

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////