My first patch to Perl 5 was a quick and dirty tiny feature enhancement. It also broke a couple of tests. That small act of public humiliation reinforced what I already knew was a good practice; automated testing is an important part of creating software that works.

I spent a couple of years chasing two goals. First, to create tools of such quality and ease of use that there’s no reason not to write good tests for Perl code. Second, to add tests so that we could immediately identify regressions and track them down to specific checkins.

At O'Reilly.

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