This is more of a "using Perl code for doing QA" than "doing QA of Perl
code", so apologies if it turns out to be completely off topic...
At OSCON last week I presented an automated test harness called
'Crucible', which we've used for testing the Linux kernel, NFSv4 in a
client-server environment, and GUI libs/apps such as Inkscape and Cairo.
It is particularly useful in testing situations where you need to
coordinate reboots, reimaging, reinstallation, and testing on sets of
different machines. From what I've read on this list, it sounds like
Crucible would be way overkill, but I love Perl and maybe others have
ideas on how to apply it to making Perl better.
Crucible is composed of a number of separate Perl and bash tools (most
of which are available from CPAN), and can be extended with Perl, bash,
or other scripting languages. The presentation I gave at OSCON (and the
original SVG slides) is available here:
http://crucible.sourceforge.net/docs/
This presentation describes how to use Crucible in a Xen environment,
where you wish to use one (or a few) machines to give the benefits of a
large test lab. It includes examples of doing multi-distro testing with
Xen partitions, scalability of a network service with multiple clients,
and downloading/compiling/installing newly released versions of
underlying libs, compilers, or linux kernels for testing your code
against.
We've also just put out a new release, Crucible 1.6. You can download
it here (along with the Perl modules, if you don't want to get them via
CPAN for some odd reason):
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47517
Crucible's website is a bit light at the moment but can be accessed
here:
http://crucible.sourceforge.net
Bryce
