I don't understand precisely what you're objecting to about this code example, but I have found it's impossible to write large scale tests with helper methods. I use subs in my tests like I would in any other program to break down functionality into small parts. The trick with tests is that you may want to use some very basic Test::Builder in order to make sure you get a useful error message when the tests fail, e.g. print out what the relevant test data was, not just the line number.