The Quality of CPAN Modules

(30-60 minutes talk by Gabor Szabo)

What did you do last week for the Perl Community ?

Questions:

How to select a module for a task ?
- Suitability to the task
- Quality of the module

Which modules are of high quality ?
What does Quality mean ?
How can I help to improve it ?

What is Quality ?

Does what I need
Does what the documentation says
Has documentation
Can be maintained
Can be sub-classed (in case of OOP) or extended
Has tests
They all pass....
many other things...

search.cpan.org

We most likely will use http://search.cpan.org/ to find our module
Has several out-bound links to other sites

RT

http://rt.cpan.org/
The bug tracking system for the perl modules
Not everyone uses it / takes care of the bugs
A lot of people don't close their bugs
Should we nag them?

Report a bug today !

CPANRATINGS (Ask Bjorn Hansen)

http://cpanratings.perl.org/
What other people say about the module
Not many reviews
Not enough comparative suggestions
Getting better every day !

Give 2 minutes from you life !

CPAN Testers

http://testers.cpan.org/
Database of test results
Reported by the "CPAN Testers"

Effortless help using CPANPLUS

CPANPLUS

http://cpanplus.sourceforge.net/
replacement of the CPAN module
allows you to mostly automatically send reports to the Testers database
you can help the community with basically 0 effort

Go ahead, install it today and start using it

QA-Perl

http://qa.perl.org/
Central site and mailing list of the QA activity in and around Perl
How to write tests
How to improve the general quality of the CPAN modules

Phalanx project

http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/
Improve the test Quality (most notably the test suite)
100 central CPAN modules

CPANTS (Thomas Klausner)

http://cpants.dev.zsi.at/cpants_paper.html
So what is Quality ?
Don't know. Hard to define.
Let's talk about Kwalitee instead (Michael Schwern)
It looks like quality, it sounds like quality, but it's not quite quality.
http://cpants.szabgab.com/

Conclusion

Where do you want to help today ?