Thank you all for your input and responses. I got to spend a full day working reading perl documentation and learning exactly what does not work ;). Here is what I found and what worked....

Worked

my $coderef = \&{$testname};
$system = $coderef->($self, $system); #test
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should have worked based on documentation but doesnt

$self->$testname($system);
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I'm sorry that I did not get the example code down smaller and will try to do so so any future finders might understand more easily. Y'alls help is a life saver.