Fixtures on Purpose: Fixture Personas

Part 2 of Fixtures on Purpose , a series about designing test data for Rails. In the last post I made the case that you can’t create a fixture for every combination of data states. The math doesn’t work. What you need instead are a small number of well-chosen archetypes that tests can mutate into edge cases. But how do you choose the archetypes? How do you decide which configurations deserve a…