As with documentation or the use of source control, this is a case where you need to measure and report on the behavior you want to incentivize.

I once worked for a group that was required to measure the way they spent their time, and most of the group members were 3-6 months behind on reporting. I was tasked with getting everyone 'current' -- a thankless job requiring some rather Orwellian adjustments of history. I hit upon the happy idea of offering gold, silver, green and blue stars for those who complied with the requirement to various degrees, and published the names (and awards) in our monthly newsletter. It was a silly thing, but people actually took a childlike glee in getting more stars than the guy in the next cube.

Now I measure POD coverage and compliance with our Subversion repository, and I have a little report on our departmental webserver that shows where everyone stands with respect to those metrics ... at the end of each quarter we compete with one another to see who can get a better data point on the graph. If I were in your shoes, I would do a similar thing with test coverage.

Most of us didn't get enough gold stars in grade school ... don't underestimate this powerful (and lighthearted) motivational tool.

In reply to Re: RFC: Perl Testing -- How to Introduce to a team by ptum
in thread RFC: Perl Testing -- How to Introduce to a team by NovMonk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.