Testing as a certification approach

Abstract

For years, one of the main reasons to buy commercial software instead of adopting open-source applications was the, supposed, guarantee of quality. Unfortunately that was rarely true and, fortunately, open-source projects soon adopted some good practices in their code development that lead to better tested software and therefore higher quality products. In this article we provide a guided tour of some of the best practices that have been implemented in the Perl community in the recent years, as the pathway to a better community-oriented repository of modules, with automatic distributed testing in different platforms and architectures, and with automatic quality measures calculation.