This strikes me as unusual, usually the support and testing guys want to get into development not the other way around.
In fact support and test roles are good ways to get a handle on certain aspects of development. However I do see the appeal of the problem solving and more use for soft skills.
Maybe a client facing development role would give you the same experiance.
From a Perl point of view I think there is of course Test::Simple for unit testing and LWP/HTTP::Recorder etc for automated web app testing.
A big part of testing is release management so also make sure you are up to speed of version control software.
Also download and evaluate some commercial test suites such as
Rational