  Supporting e-Science in the EGI e-Infrastructure requires extensive and
reliable software, for advanced computing use, deployed across over
approximately 300 European and worldwide data centers. The Unified Middleware
Distribution (UMD) and Cloud Middleware Distribution (CMD) are the channels to
deliver the software for the EGI e-Infrastructure consumption. The software is
compiled, validated and distributed following the Software Provisioning Process
(SWPP), where the Quality Criteria (QC) definition sets the minimum quality
requirements for EGI acceptance. The growing number of software components
currently existing within UMD and CMD distributions hinders the application of
the traditional, manual-based validation mechanisms, thus driving the adoption
of automated solutions. This paper presents umd-verification, an open-source
tool that enforces the fulfillment of the QC requirements in an automated way
for the continuous validation of the software products for scientific disposal.
The umd-verification tool has been successfully integrated within the SWPP
pipeline and is progressively supporting the full validation of the products in
the UMD and CMD repositories. While the cost of supporting new products is
dependant on the availability of Infrastructure as Code solutions to take over
the deployment and high test coverage, the results obtained for the already
integrated products are promising, as the time invested in the validation of
products has been drastically reduced. Furthermore, automation adoption has
brought along benefits for the reliability of the process, such as the removal
of human-associated errors or the risk of regression of previously tested
functionalities.
