Testing NUT, the Network UPS Tools

This is part of a series of articles I started with Quality Assurance and Automated Testing in Open Source Software.

The primary goal of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project is to provide reliable monitoring of UPS hardware and ensure safe shutdowns of the systems which are connected.

I gut to NUT as I saw they are using BuildBot to build the application and NUT seemed to be interesting to write about. Not only does it have its own interface but it needs to be able to talk to many external devices - so one might want to have some mockup of these external devices for testing. It also talks over the tcp/ip network so it has yet another interface that should be tested.

So I found the BuildBot result page but from the reports it seems to me that there is no "make test" phase. The reports seem to end after the compilation phase. (ok, actually a copied tarball follows but I guess it should just copy the result back to the BuildBot server.)

It was rather tricky to find the GForge page on Alioth that describes this project. There was only one link to it under the Mailing lists entry. Once I found it, I looked at the NUT Tasks entry.

Under NQA - NUT Quality Assurance they seem to have several open tasks to write test and to write documentation on how to test.

So it seems they don't do any automated test.