Test::Class and test organization

[dragonchild]

I'm looking to convert DBM::Deep's test suite to use Test::Class because I need to reuse a large number of test cases. I really don't want to use a library of functions because that's going to get unwieldy very very quickly. So, I was hoping Test::Class would be the solution.

The problem is that I have classes that have waaaay more functionality than can be tested in one file. So, the recommended organisation of Foo::Bar::Test testing Foo::Bar isn't going to work.

What I'm thinking of is writing test classes that encapsulate tests given a certain setup. So, something like:

package Test::Floober;

# This inherits from Test::Class
use base 'My::Test::BaseClass';

sub test1 : Test(5) {
    my $self = shift;
    # Do stuff here with $self->{foo} and $self->{bar}
    # that were passed in at new()
}

Then, in my test file, I could have something like:

use Test::Floober;

my $test = Test::Floober->new( foo => 2, bar => 5 );
my $test2 = Test::Floober->new( foo => 'abcd', bar => [ 2 .. 5 ] );

Test::Class->runtests( $test, $test2 );

I got a couple questions:

• How does the plan get set in these instances? I can run planless, but I'd prefer not to.
• I'm not sure it will make sense in every instance to pre-build all the test cases as in the situation above. How would Test::Class know the plan then?
• Is this a sane use of Test::Class? My only exposure to xUnit has been Rails and the tests I wrote there were variations of the stock test, not anything complex.