Looking for some best practice here:
I'm looking to future proof the selenium tests that I'm building. They'll involve shared elements (products/locations/users), and it seems like a bad pattern to be building unique, test specific data for each test in isolation.
So how do I avoid my setup/teardown potentially wrecking other tests?
Bootstrap a clean environment for each test to test in isolation. This might look like a lot of overhead, but is very needed if you want to parallel run your tests and not get flickering and possible untrusted tests.
Personally I create a session GUID and then generate test data and store in it in a database with the GUID. Boot an environment and let it point to the dataset. Automating this should already be part of the automated build-pipeline, if not this is a good reason to start working on it :)
Also read my answers to https://sqa.stackexchange.com/a/12225/3201 and https://sqa.stackexchange.com/a/13660/3201 which are about managing testdata and environments.
