I have a little bit of Perl knowledge, having programmed some text parsers a while back. I have a relatively large IT project I am contracting out to a small software engineering company. A large part of this project will be completed in Perl. I would like the system to be usable/extendable for at least several years and be the foundation of a larger system. I am scared of being sold a bunch of scripts that satisfy the feature test, but need to be scrapped in a couple of years.
Now my question: How can I assure that the system written is well-done? I am assuming it should be OO, with clean documentation and sensible classes, a documented and thought-out database structure as well as abstraction where possible. These are things I can observe. What else could/should I check for?