> Your CI/CD should just prep the database you need instead of mocking. This is a hard one. A lot of tests require setup steps even if you're using a real data

> Your CI/CD should just prep the database you need instead of mocking. This is a hard one. A lot of tests require setup steps even if you're using a real database, so it's not even that different than a mock. And if you can't give each test its own database to work with, then you have to run your tests serially. I'm working on a codebase that spins up 4 separate database engines in docker, and each test has quite a few setup steps. The result is brittle tests that take hours to run, so they're not very useful as a release gate. I've been bitten by mocks before too though, so I don't have good answers.