Isolating test data in acceptance tests
- by Matt Phillips
I'm looking for guidance on how to keep my acceptance tests isolated. Right now the issue I'm having with being able to run the tests in parallel is the database records that are manipulated in the tests. I've written helpers that take care of doing inserts and deletes before tests are executed, to make sure the state is correct. But now I can't run them in parallel against the same database without uniquely generating the test data fields for each test. For example.
Testing creating a row i'll delete everything where column A = foo and column B = bar
Then I'll navigate through the UI in the test and create a record with column A = foo and column B = bar.
Testing that a duplicate row is not allowed to be created. I'll insert a row with column A = foo and column B = bar and then use the UI to try and do the exact same thing. This will display an error message in the UI as expected.
These tests work perfectly when ran separately and serially. But I can't run them at the same time for fear that one will create or delete a record the other is expecting. Any tips on how to structure them better so they can be run in parallel?
