Re: Does anybody write tests first?

[kyle]

I've had the best luck with writing the synopsis first—the stuff that goes near the top of the POD. This way I get a simple use case from start to finish. Usually that shakes out the knees and elbows of the interface I had in my mind. I can streamline things before I've coded any decisions. Once that looks good, it's pretty easy to translate into test cases.

[doom]

I've had the best luck with writing the synopsis first—the stuff that goes near the top of the POD.

Yes, I was going to say something like that. I don't always write tests first (writing them soon is good enough), but writing (some of) the documentation first is almost always helpful. I find it encourages me to simplify the interface: I get rid of unnecessary options because they're too much of a pain to write about.

But it sounds like the OP has not yet gotten in the habit of putting almost all of the code into modules, and that's really the first step toward sanity. For one thing, it makes it a lot easier to write fine-grained unit tests.