Getting Started

So you want to become a CPAN Tester, what do you need?

Firstly, you simply need a machine with an operating system and a version of Perl installed. There are now between 20-30 platforms and 10-20 flavours of Perl being used for regular testing, but testers are still not able to cover everything. If you have a machine available, adding to the weight of reports is much appreciated.

Secondly, you'll need to install a bunch of distributions from CPAN, which provide the testing framework. Which modules, depends currently on whether you wish to test using CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS.

CPAN-YACSmoke is a larger framework, while the CPAN/CPAN-Reporter framework is rather more lightweight. The following sections details the installation, configuration and usage of each. If you have any problems or suggestions for improvements, please use the RT mechanism for the individual modules to contact the respective authors.