Once you've caught the testing bug, you can take things to the 'next level' by releasing your code to CPAN. Then the CPAN Testers team will introduce you to the joys of cross platform testing issues.

I've learnt numerous lessons the hard way (many of which in retrospect were pretty bloody obvious), including:

• don't assemble pathnames using '/' - use File::Spec
• don't assume everyone has a recent version of Perl
• be careful that your tests don't make any assumptions about the order of keys in a hash
• don't assume any relationship between the current system time and the timestamp on that file you just created (the fileserver time may be different)
• make sure you know which version of other modules you depend on - you don't want their old bugs to break your test suite
• don't assume anyone will read the README - try to integrate all dependency checking into your build process (ie: before the tests run)
• just because a module you require is installed don't assume it works (there are a surprising number of people who watch 100% of tests fail, run make install anway and congratulate themselves on a job well done)

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