A) Should I try and find the author of the dependant module and ask for a sollution?

Nope, absolutely not. All you've shown us is that make failed, which is a pretty useless error message (you've managed to omit the more useful one).

B) Is there a way of finding out exactly what went wrong?

Yes, get rid of the intermediary(cpan) do a 'make realclean', and then report everything the make dance outputs (from perl Makefile.PL to make test) without omitting anything. You should also (for completeness) report the output of perl -V.

D) Is the test irrelevent and somehow 'forcing' it will suffice?

The test is always relevant, but forcing will sometimes suffice (it depends). There are a lot of poorly written tests out there, so you'll have to examine them and judge for yourself, but in my experience if the entire test suite is at least %90 ok, forcing is ok.