Fixtures on Purpose: Mining Production for Personas

Part 4 of Fixtures on Purpose , a series about designing test data for Rails. I’ve been making a case for fixture personas. Named archetypes like “Riverside Health” (full-featured) and “Corner Shop” (simple retail) that represent clusters of real-world configurations. But I glossed over the hardest part: how do you know what the archetypes should be? You can guess. I’ve done that. You sit in a…