Currently, we do not have a Quality Assurance (QA) department. I've been pushing this issue rather strongly here at work as some of the work that we are doing is rather complex and relies on ad hoc testing of the sites we're building. Naturally, this is not an acceptable solution and a proper QA department (or person) who can institute an automated testing program should greatly improve the reliability of our products and increase our development speed. However, until we get someone to fill this position, I've been looking into alternatives.

One thing I've been considering is exploring Design by Contract. If you're not familiar with it, Design by Contract is a way of designing systems where each component specifies exactly what it accepts and what it will produce. This is the 'contract' between the client and server. Any code that violates the contract immediately generates useful error messages that can be used to track down and punish the offenders. Further, one can simply turn off the module to ensure that this does not affect the performance of production code.

I've never actually used this technique and it was my intention of downloading the modules and start testing them. Unfortunately, the link on the CPAN appears to be broken. I've also checked http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_perl/cpan-search?request=search (a great CPAN mirror) to no avail. Until such time that I get a tarball to install and test with, can anyone offer suggestions or thoughts about using this? I know that many here do not care for Bondage and Discipline in code, but we're working on some rather large projects that are becoming unmanageable.

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to Stopgap measures when you don't have a QA department by Ovid

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