I Stopped Writing Database Fixtures by Hand. Here's What I Do Instead.

I'll be honest with you. For the longest time, writing database fixtures was just something I accepted as part of the job. You build a feature, you write the tests, you write the fake data the tests run against. Nobody loves doing it. Nobody complains loudly enough to change it. It just becomes part of the rhythm. Then I inherited a codebase where the fixtures hadn't been touched in two years. The schema had changed eleven times. Half the foreign keys in the fixture files pointed to IDs that no