Goal: Learn the basic patterns for setting up test data.

When you carry out your manual tests, you know that most of the time is consumed by setting up the right data. Being a real IT pro, you will think up ways of doing this as efficiently as possible. You might have thought of making sure of the following:

• A basic setup of data is available, which will be the foundation for all of the tests you are going to execute
• For each feature under test, additional test data exists upfront
• Test specific data will be created on the fly

This way you created yourself a number of patterns that help you efficiently get your test data setup done. These are what we call test data setup design patterns, or fixture or test fixture design patterns, and each has its own name:

• The first one is what we call a prebuilt fixture. This is test data that...