How are you testing the boards? Does it involve a lot of repeating steps? What OS are you using to test them (I'm assuming you're not going at the boards with a simple multi-meter) :-)

Perl is pretty good at automating software. If you want to look at it that way, it's a sort of shell scripting on steroids^tm.

If you're dealing with win32 GUI tools, you may be interested in Win32::API and Win32::GuiTest. If you want to run and check the output of DOS/Win32/Unix/Other command-line tools, see perlopentut and possibly perlipc.

If you're dealing with applications that have a well-defined API, it's possible you can find a module to interface with it at http://search.cpan.org. If the program (or library) has some sort of C API, you can probably get it to work with Inline::C, or failing that the more powerful (but more intricate) XS.

You may find it helps to be more specific in your questions. :)