Hello monks...

Awhile back I asked for some help with some code for an article I was writing for Better Software magazine (formerly Software Testing and Quality Engineering). I got some great comments and suggestions.

Some background on the theme here: many software testers today are in fact UI or domain experts. However, the software testing culture is shifting and is starting to value programming and sysadmin skills more than UI and domain expertise. Many testers are facing an uncertain future in the industry unless they can pick up some very basic programming skills.

My article was intended to outline a common testing problem that can not be solved manually, then demonstrate a solution to the problem with a script that was easy for a newbie to understand. My scripts, while not too technically excellent, are readable (I hope) and show some nice features of Perl that should be attractive to a newbie. (I was a bigger newbie when I wrote these, I probably would have written them slightly differently today.) Like the man said, there's nothing wrong with Baby Perl.

Anyway, they show some nifty things about Perl:
CPAN and modules: File::Find and List::Compare, both pretty intuitive
open.. or die()
for loops
lc()
unless () (very readable and nifty in this context)
simple regexes
print

The article isn't on the web yet, but here's the TOC with a summary of the article (under "Departments" at the bottom of the page, page 14) and here's the code for the two little scripts.

Thanks again to all the monks who commented. The comments I ignored were maybe even the most valuable, because I had to think very carefully about why I had written it that way.