O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Session
Practical Perl Testing
chromatic, Technical Evangelist, O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Ian Langworth
Andy Lester, Senior Programmer, Follett Library Resources
Bill Odom, President, The Perl Foundation

Track: Perl
Date: Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005
Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Location: Portland 251
Test-driven development is a growing success story in the Perl community. It's a great way to improve software reliability, and to increase confidence that an application will perform as required.
Some scenarios are easier to test than others, however. It's a lot easier to make sure a method always returns an integer, for example, than to make sure an application degrades gracefully when the network disappears.
This presentation will demonstrate testing techniques to deal with situations such as:
- Power failure
- Network disconnection
- Insufficient disk space
- Insufficient memory
- Missing components (Perl and otherwise)
- Unreliable hardware
Although this presentation covers these techniques from a Perl perspective (and with Perl code), the solutions and examples offered are applicable to many different environments.