Testing Perl Software

brian_d_foy on 2005-08-10T04:09:10

I made it through my Uniforum presentation, and somehow the sinus cold that's been threatening to bring me down stayed out of my way.

I gave the who, what, why, where and how much of testing then showed the group some of the test suites for my modules. It's sort of like showing everyone your dirty laundry. Since I gave out a copy of Damian's Perl Best Practices, I felt like I had to explain why I had done things that way (i.e. "I'm (stupid|lazy|whatever"), but that moved into explaining how you can set up a test suite with the basics then add to it as you encounter problems. I think that can lower the barrier to starting testing: start small and add to it over time.

At the end I gave out two Perl Testing: A Developers Notebook, one Learning Perl, 4th Edition, one Learning Perl References, Objects, and Modules, a Stonehenge pen-knife, a Firefox sticker (three Firefox users out of the 20 present), a Black Duck sticker ("Black Duck does something with something"), and several camel temporary tatoos. This still doesn't deplete all the Perl junk I have in my office.