dominus has three excellent articles on why "it's stupid to use a variable as a variable name".

My personal preference (and this can be done in just about any context that uses symblic refs) is to use a hash table instead. In your case, it would be something like:

my @tests = (
    { name => 'test1', 
      code => sub { print "this is test 1\n"; },
    },
    { name => 'test2', 
      code => sub { print "this is test 2\n"; },
    },
);
for my $t (@tests)
{
    print "Test $t->{name} is currently running\n";
    $t->{code}();
}
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This is untested, but variations are of course possible.