perlcritic is "a static source code analysis engine", a CPAN module which can also be used as a command . An example: $ perlcritic -severity 3 src/AModule.pm Subroutine does not end with "return" at line 24, column 1. See page 197 of PBP. (Severity: 4) Return value of eval not tested. at line 32, column 5. You can't depend upon the value of $@/$EVAL_ERROR to tell whether an eval failed.. (Severity: 3) As you can see you can get extremely useful information about the sanity of your code and how much it complies to good coding practices. There are 5 different severity levels (being 5 the "less critic"). Most Policy modules are based on Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices ( PBP ), but it's not limited to it. I run perlcritic (using typically severity 3) automatically on all the source code files, every time I run the unit tests and/or build a package, in order to get as soon as possible a valuable feedback after code changes. Since the ...