The scope of MOOSE Tools is to provide a set of utilities to support MOOSE development. Namely, verification, testing, documentation, and data analysis and manipulation of MOOSE code and I/O. Tools code is written in a general way, so that it can be extended and tuned to the needs of the user/developer. The major two systems of the Tools utilities are described in the following sections, but more information on the support utilities also contained within MOOSE tools can be found on the main documentation page.

MooseDocs

The MOOSE Documentation System (MooseDocs) facilitates documentation of the MOOSE and MOOSE Tools code bases, as well as supports the MOOSE Software Quality Assurance (SQA) practices. It contains many extensions for website rendering, navigation, linking, bibliographic references, and support for integration of code and input file snippets (among many more features), as well as capabilities for development of training and presentation slides and reports.

TestHarness

The TestHarness system is responsible for finding tests and running them. The extended philosophy behind MOOSE testing can be found in the MOOSE Test System documentation page, and this philosophy has driven the creation and design choices of the TestHarness system.

Within MOOSE there are three different testing ideas:

  1. The "tests": which are typically "Regression Tests" consisting of input files and known good outputs ("gold" files).

  2. Unit tests that test the functionality of small separable pieces

  3. The TestHarness: a piece of software that was written to _run_ tests and aggregate the results.

The TestHarness integrates with the MOOSE continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) workflows to facilitate testing across multiple operating systems and hardware architectures.