I've hacked quite a bit of code by now, whether my own or other people's. I've developed a few small projects from concept to working beta for in-house production uses. What I haven't done is develop installation scripts to automate the propogation of useful code onto other people's servers.

Discussion in another node led me to read some perldoc from modules in Test::. What I could use at this point is some better idea of what a testing plan is, how it is developed? I have a friend who rails against being asked to write code without a testing plan in place. But I'm wondering how one would go about planning tests for code which hasn't been written yet. Surely a testing plan is something more than the number of tests you anticipate running during installation. Isn't it?

I'm guessing one would want to test the installation environment to make sure it will support the script and its dependencies. What else would one test?

-- Hugh

UPDATE

Well folks, that was great. I didn't write a lick of code yesterday but I did work my way through the entire book linked below on Extreme Perl. Facsinating read. Its like I'm just now starting to learn how to code, perhaps 26 years since that first assembler class in college. I think I'll spend some time with some more perldoc from Test::* and then try my hand at writing a test suite for my current project. At this rate, it may be a while before I get back to writing new code as a part of that project. Thanks to all the respondents below. That was very educational and its like starting all over now, in a way.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.