Fixtures on Purpose: The Combinatorial Trap

Part 1 of Fixtures on Purpose , a series about designing test data for Rails. I’ve seen teams with 300 fixture records and climbing. Every new feature gets a handful of new fixtures. Every bug fix adds another special-case record. The YAML files grow and nobody can explain what half the records are for. I’ve also seen teams with 30 fixture records that cover more ground. Not because they test…