| Is there any sexier topic in software development than software testing, at least besides game programming, 3D graphics, audio, high-performance clustering, cool web sites, and so on? Okay, so software testing is low on the list. That's unfortunate, because good software testing can increase your productivity, improve your designs, raise your quality, ease your maintenance burdens, and help to satisfy your customers, coworkers, and managers. It's no surprise that the agile development techniques place such an emphasis on automated software testing ”when it clicks for you and you understand it, you'll wonder how you ever wrote software without it. Perl has a bit of a reputation for being hackish and unserious. It's certainly good for doing quick and dirty jobs quickly and dirtily. However, if you approach it with discipline, you'll find that it's suitable for big, serious projects. You probably already know this. You may not know how to apply the discipline, though. That's where this book can help. Perl has a strong history of automated tests. The earliest release of Perl 1.0 the authors know of included a comprehensive test suite. It's only improved from there. The CPAN, a huge archive of freely available and reusable Perl code, exerts strong social pressure on contributors to write and maintain good test suites for their code. It also includes dozens of useful testing modules to make testing possible, or even easy. Of course, your main job probably isn't all Perl all the time. It may be just one of a handful of good tools you use. That's fine. Learning how Perl's test tools work and how to put them together to solve all sorts of previously intractable problems can make you a better programmer in general. Besides, it's easy to use the Perl tools described here (and others that the future will bring) to handle all sorts of testing problems you encounter, even in other languages. You don't have to be a die-hard free and open source software developer who lives, breathes, and dreams Perl to use this book. You just have to want to do your job a little bit better. |
