On subjects like this, I often turn to
Writing Perl Modules for CPAN by Sam Tregar, from the
Apress. It talks about the h2xs structure, and ways of doing automated testing and so on...
Here's a
Simon Cozens review (he's a bit more down on the book than I am).
That doesn't answer the whole question though... very few professional software development environments would be based on the CPAN packaging system (it could probably be done, but would seem like a kludge). The ways people really
do it would be interesting to hear about (just as an example: is there any standard at all outside of the h2xs world about where to put test files and what to name them?
Myself, I lean toward putting the test for Modular::Stuff
in a directory named "t" located in the same place as the
Stuff.pm file, and calling it Modular-Stuff.t, but other choices are possible).
There's nothing wrong with Randal Schwartz "Learning Perl Objects" (I bought a copy to read on vacation once.) It could easily be that going through that book would be a step
in the direction of learning how to do large scale programming, but it's a pretty early step.