Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 3. Managing Tests

All the normal rules of programming apply to tests: stay organized, reduce duplication, and don’t take on more technical debt than you need. For small projects, it’s easy to create and manage single test files. Large or important projects need more thought and care. Where do you put your tests? How do you organize them between files? What options do you have to reduce complexity to manageable levels?

This chapter’s labs explain how to organize your test files into test suites, know and improve the reach of your tests, write your own custom testing libraries, and interpret test results.

Organizing Tests

Writing tests is easy. Managing tests well is more difficult. Having complete test coverage is worthless if running the complete test suite is so difficult that no one ever does it. Making your tests easy to run without user intervention and making it easy to interpret their results will pay off over and over again.

Using the standard testing tools that understand the Test Anything Protocol is just one part of the process. Organizing your tests sensibly is another.

How do I do that?

Consider the tests for the Test::Harness module. Download the latest distribution from the CPAN and extract it. Change into the newly created directory, run Makefile.PL, and build and test the module:

Note

Look for the Download link at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Test-Harnes/ .

    $ perl Makefile.PL
    Checking if your kit is complete...
    Looks good
    Writing Makefile for Test::Harness
    $ make ...