Perl modules with well written testing suites

nuance has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Guys,

I'm shortly going to be involved in testing a large scale system, written in perl. I've got a couple of years experience in software testing, but I've never tested perl. I'm familiar with the basics of what I'm doing, but need to translate that "general knowledge" into "perl knowledge".

CPAN is massive and I assume that not everything is tested in an optimum manner. I could spend months trying to find something suitable. Is anyone familiar with the testing suites written for any of the CPAN modules? Specifically what I'm looking for is a couple of modules that I can examine to get a general gist of how to go about this task.

Can anyone recommend a module or two that I can go look at to get pointers in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

Nuance

Comment on Perl modules with well written testing suites

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(Ovid) Re: Perl modules with well written testing suites by Ovid (Cardinal) on Aug 23, 2000 at 20:28 UTC
Here's what I've come up with: Test. Provides a simple framework for creating test scripts. Test::Harness. run perl standard test scripts with statistics. Template::Test. module for automating test scripts. HTML::Testing. Test module to make test files simpler. General list of test related Perl modules. I tried to pick out the ones that I thought would most likely fit what you're looking for, but I haven't actually used any of them. Unfortunately, I don't know that Perl has the testing suite support that's available for other products. I just haven't heard much in this area. If you find anything that looks really good, please post a follow-up. Good luck! Cheers, Ovid	[reply]
Re: Perl modules with well written testing suites by btrott (Parson) on Aug 23, 2000 at 20:20 UTC
I was just working on this myself the other day, and I took a look at Storable and HTML::Embperl, if I remember correctly. They were helpful for getting down the basics of how to do it. It sounds more like your question might be what to do, though, ie. what exactly you should be testing. Perhaps? The most important reason for having a test suite, I think, is that it should test every important piece of your system. This allows for: Easy portability testing; you have a defined set of tests that you can run on different platforms. If some fail, you know what you need to work on. Version maintenance. If someone makes a change to the system, and it breaks a test when you next run the test suite, you know which change caused the problem, and where it broke in the test suite. This is very good for you, because you now have a better sense of what to fix. I realize that this isn't very specific, but really the specifics all deal with your particular system.	[reply]
Re: Perl modules with well written testing suites by BooK (Curate) on Aug 24, 2000 at 02:07 UTC
Just a quick comment to add that, as an example, Test::Cmd is very useful. I am also planning to use a `t/` directory, and following this example added a little clarity to the Test and Test::Harness man pages. I am not sure Benchmark is useful for (regression) testing. It is however, to finetune your code.	[reply]
RE: Perl modules with well written testing suites by knight (Friar) on Aug 23, 2000 at 21:26 UTC
You also might want to take a look at Test::Cmd, which I created to try to factor out some underlying testing building blocks common to a number of utilities for which I was writing test suites. The intention is for you to subclass Test::Cmd to build up testing infrastructure that's particular to your command or system under test. In addition to providing some potentially useful testing infrastructure in its own right, it uses the standard Test module for its own internal tests, which might serve as a useful example.	[reply]
RE (tilly) 1: Perl modules with well written testing suites by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 23, 2000 at 20:27 UTC
I suggest starting by looking at Test and Benchmark. For examples with Test, virtually all CPAN modules come with a /t directory of tests that use it. Running that test suite is what "make test" is supposed to do.	[reply]