[sameoldtune]

My gift to any team I work with is an integration test harness that usually has some kind of DSL for setting up state. This looks wildly different depending on the project. But my theory is that if tests are easy to write then it is easy to make more of them. So it is worth it to write some ugly code one time under the hood to make this happen.

If every test requires copy pasting a bunch of sql statements and creating a new user and data, my experience is the team will have 3-4 of these kinds of tests. But if the test set-up code looks like `newUser().withFriends(3).withTextPost(“foo”).withMediaPost().sharingDisabled().with…` then the team is enabled to make a new integration test any time they think of an edge case.

[williamdclt]

we have _exactly_ that (down to the `withXXX` syntax), and indeed I found it great.

Downside is that test setup can be a bit slow: each `withXXX` can create more data than really necessary (eg a "withPost()" might update some "Timeline" objects, even though you really don't care about timelines for your test). Upside is that it's a lot closer to what happens in reality, regularly finding bugs as side-effect. And also you align incentives: you make your tests faster my making your application faster.