I've received a lot of good advice so far, and thank you all. Most useful has been the office politics stuff, which I'm really bad at. I guess it's an aspect of geekiness: I'm more concerned with doing my job than having a career.

As to perl, there seem to be two schools of thought:

1. Start coding right away so I have something to show for the first week (and preferably the first day).
2. Create a good test harness that everyone can use.

The first I understand. There's a lot to be said for hitting the ground running, and not spending the first month on an all-inclusive framework. The second seems like a longer-term project that will reap huge dividends in the second quarter but I won't have much to show for Week #1 or Month #1.

At this point I'm thinking that the way to go is to code some simple tests to see how the system works and what the potential pitfalls are. At the end of week one, I'll have a few dozen testcases down and have something to put in Status Report #1. I'll write these tests with teh expectation that they will be put into a harness at some future time. In the second month, I build a harness based around Test.pm and begin rolling the testcases in (and developing more along the way.

I'm looking for some guidance here. Has anyone tried this approach? Also, my intention is to print the output from the test harness to a web page so that my results can be public (when I'm ready to go public). Has anyone tried linking Test::Harness and one of the many HTML modules? Any advice?

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