What favorite Perl module or book would you recommend for test writers?
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Showing messages 1 through 7 of 7.

• Tell me about it
  2005-08-06 21:11:49  wnodom [Reply | View]
  
  
  Practical Perl testing was an odd session
  
  Trust me, it felt odd being one of the presenters, too. In my opinion (and I think it's shared by my cohorts), the presentation format was an experiment that went awry. :-)
  
  Fortunately, quite a few people told me afterwards that they got a lot out of the talk, and had added new tools to their toolboxes as a result of it. The session may have been choppy and a little surreal, but I'm thankful that a lot of folks found it useful nonetheless.
  
  Meanwhile MJD (in barefoot mode) lay on the floor chatting with Schwern and interrupted at random.
  
  Well, sort of. You may have seen me duck down early in the session to talk with both of them. I wasn't asking them to be quiet; rather, I was actually asking them to speak up if they had a question or comment, instead of just talking to each other. They're both really smart, with interesting (albeit very different) perspectives, so I asked them to jump in when appropriate. I was glad they did.
  
  Test::LongString - Show shorter and hopefully more helpful failure messages when very long strings don't compare equal; several people pointed out that this module fell short of what it should have done.
  
  Rafael was actually in the audience, and updated this module to address some of those shortcomings while the session was still underway. Sometimes the system works. :-)
  
  Thanks for the synopsis, and the comments (even the ones that sting a little).
  
  Bill Odom
  
• Tell me about it
  2005-08-07 11:40:36  Geoff Broadwell | [Reply | View]
  
  
  Trust me, it felt odd being one of the presenters, too. In my opinion (and I think it's shared by my cohorts), the presentation format was an experiment that went awry. :-)
  
  What was the original plan? I'm curious if it was an experiment that bears repeating with a few tweaks / lessons learned.
  
  Fortunately, quite a few people told me afterwards that they got a lot out of the talk, and had added new tools to their toolboxes as a result of it. The session may have been choppy and a little surreal, but I'm thankful that a lot of folks found it useful nonetheless.
  
  And I was certainly one of those folks. Sorry that the bitterness associated with computer issues made me miss saying so the second time around!
  
  <MJD and Schwern interruptions>
  
  Actually, I think this might have worked well as a planned thing -- "We're the presenters, but we've asked a couple other people to jump in if we miss something."
  
  Rafael was actually in the audience, and updated this module to address some of those shortcomings while the session was still underway. Sometimes the system works. :-)
  
  Very cool. One of those things I really love about real-time geek get-togethers of any sort.
  
  Thanks for the synopsis, and the comments (even the ones that sting a little).
  
  You're welcome, and sorry if they came out too harsh. "Computer troubles and sleep deprivation make Geoff something something."
• Tell me about it
  2005-08-08 18:30:52  wnodom [Reply | View]
  
  
  What was the original plan? I'm curious if it was an experiment that bears repeating with a few tweaks / lessons learned.
  
  We wanted to make things fast-paced, switch among topics relatively quickly, and to have all four of us participating more rather than less. Think one main presenter at a time, with others jumping in with additional information, questions, or even alternative viewpoints. Last-minute changes (that seemed like a good idea at the time) -- coupled with an unexpected shortage of wireless mics -- made that a lot harder to do. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but you get the idea.
  
  All four of us have done "pair presentations" before, so we know that can work well, but the jury's still out on how to make it scale. :-)
  
  Actually, I think this might have worked well as a planned thing -- "We're the presenters, but we've asked a couple other people to jump in if we miss something."
  
  So you can see how we thought that what I described above could work. I did ask Schwern to show up, and Mark was a pleasant surprise. (Really, I mean it.)
  
  sorry if they came out too harsh
  
  Oh, no worries. Believe me, I expected much worse... and it's probably out there, waiting for me to find it. :-)
  
  
• Stupid fingers
  2005-08-06 21:15:29  wnodom [Reply | View]
  
  
  Sorry, left off the closing italics tag on the Test::LongString paragraph. Everything from "Rafael was actually in the audience" and onward is from me, not Geoff.
  

• Java book
  2005-08-05 08:40:14  brad.cavanagh [Reply | View]
  
  
  Geoff, the name of that Java book is "Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java and JUnit".
• Java book
  2005-08-07 11:29:49  Geoff Broadwell | [Reply | View]
  
  
  Ah, thank you brad! With that fix, it came up as the first entire page of Google results. :-)
  

• More on the MJD question
  2005-08-05 04:28:19  adrianh [Reply | View]
  
  
  <blockquote>Finally, MJD asked about doing test-first development when you're unclear on the form that your app will eventually take.</blockquote>
  
  

  There's a perlmonks thread (http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=480680) that Ovid started on the points that MJD raised.