Perl Quality Assurance Projects

There are multiple projects in the Perl community related to

• improving and testing the quality and portability of Perl modules and Perl itself, and
• using Perl's QA tools for general software development.

Perl-QA

The perl-qa mailing list is the general discussion list for the QA of Perl, and of using Perl for QA. (Web archive) There is also a Perl-QA wiki available.

Testing cheat sheets

Ian Langworth, author of the upcoming Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook has put together a tremendous Perl testing quick reference card.

Testing articles

perl.com has published a number of articles on specific testing techniques:

• Testing Taint
• Testing Imports
• Testing Databases
• Mocking Objects

Testing Modules

The CPAN has a wide variety of modules to help with your automated testing. Here's a summary of what's available.

Here's a handy summary of guidelines for writing effective tests, compiled from lessons learned when improving the tests for DBI.

Phalanx

Join the team to help improve tests and documentation for Perl and the CPAN. It's a big step on the way to Ponie and Perl 6. It's the Phalanx project.

Daily Build

The "smokers" do smoke tests of the bleading edge Perl on various platforms to help the developers spot new bugs as fast as possible.

Get involved by subscribing to the daily-build list by sending mail to daily-build-subscribe@perl.org (Web archive and nntp server). After subscribing you would probably like to get the smoke toolkit, see the README and smoke FAQ for information on that.

CPAN testers

cpan-testers is a volunteer group of people, that test as many distributions uploaded to CPAN as possible, across many different platforms and version of Perl. CPAN Testers was started by Graham Barr and Chris Nandor.

For more information about CPAN Testers and how to become a tester, please visit the CPAN Testers Wiki or subscribe to the cpan-testers discussion mailinglist by sending a mail to cpan-testers-discuss-subscribe@perl.org.

The CPAN Testers Reports and CPAN Testers Statistics websites, along with several other supporting websites are available to search and analyse report results.

Automated testing with Perl

Automated testing is a key part of software development, especially in environments that have embraced extreme programming. Perl's Test::Harness framework, along with Test::Simple and Test::More, allow flexible testing of all parts of your development projects.

A starter list of resources:

• Test::Tutorial, a presentation by Michael Schwern & chromatic
• Test::Tutorial, part of the Test::Simple distro
• Automated Testing With Perl, a presentation by Andy Lester