Perl tends to like its packages defined before they're used.

Indeed, this is why the Perl 5 parser creates namespaces and installs subroutines into those name spaces at compilation time.

Except for code which creates an object in a BEGIN block before the parser has even read the class package declaration, this order does not matter. The OP's question is similar to:

ok( foo(), 10, 'foo() should return value of $bar' );

my $bar = 10;
sub foo { return $bar }
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