Some time ago, Adam Kennedy thought about the future of CPAN Testing and smoke testing in general. He put some of those initial thoughts online. As time went by, he also submitted modules to CPAN.

The Practical Image Testing Architecture would require much the same kind of involvement with the current CPAN Testers, but using virtual images to implement the testing of multiple environments (e.g. with/without 3rd party libraries) for the same platform and version of Perl. Or even different combinations of platform and Perl. This would hopefully cover many more scenarios for CPAN authors than they could ever create on their own.

The final implementation is a long way off, but expect the CPAN Testers to be involved along the way :)