> Honestly, I think the idea of having tests have shared state is bad to begin with I blame this partially on our notions of code reuse. We conflate it with se

> Honestly, I think the idea of having tests have shared state is bad to begin with I blame this partially on our notions of code reuse. We conflate it with several other things, and in the case of tests we conflate it with state reuse. And the availability of state reuse leads to people writing fakes when they should be using mocks, and people not being able to tell the difference between mocks and fakes and thus being incapable to have a rational discussion about them. To my thinking, and the thinking of pretty much all of the test experts I’ve called Mentor (or even Brother), beforeEaches should be repeatable. Add a test, it repeats one more time. Delete a test, one less. And if they’re repeatable, they don’t have to share the same heap. One heap is as good as another. Lots of languages can only do that segregation at the process level. In NodeJS it would be isolates (workers). If you’re very careful about global state you could do it per thread. But that doesn’t happen very often because “you” includes library writers, language designers, and your coworker Steve who is addicted to in-memory caching. I can say, “don’t be Steve” until I’m blue in the face but nearly every team hires at least one Steve, and some are rotten with them.