This week we're joined by Ian Langworth and Chromatic. They're the authors of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. Predictably, the topic du jour is Perl and its role in QA.

This was recorded over the phone, and there's a fair bit of hiss on the line. Apologies for that--we figure that the sound quality degrades as we get multiple parties in on the call.

• QA Podcast #10: Testing with Perl with Ian Langworth and Chromatic (MP3, 19 MB, 28:20)

Here are some quotes from today's show:

"If you have other applications, such as Web applications, that Perl has testing harnesses, Perl would be an ideal tool for that sort of thing...My brother works for a large computer company testing networking equipment and things like that. It's very helpful to be able to send out a million packets a second with Perl and analyze what comes back--look at timings, look at errors, things like that."

"The advantages of testing with perl stem from the advantages of the language. For example, Perl is loosely-typed. So, even with the basic testing libraries, being able to say is the result of this action this, and not having to worry about types or other factors. It makes testing really readable, really logical and easy to interpret."

"Perl is a very appropriate language for doing extreme programming in. From the standpoint of testing or test-driven development, you want to verify the assumptions you're making in your head. Test-driven design enables you to sit down and write a test, and then write just enough code to make that test pass."

Links for this conversation's topic:

• The book on O'Reilly, and Ian and Chromatic's author pages
• Perl.com
• A list of Perl modules in the Test namespace
• An article: Testing Files and Test Modules
• An interview with Ian
• Ian's homepage
• Chromatic's homepage