I respectfully disagree. If you don't treat test code with the same respect as production code, rot sets in. Rot in the test suite discourages programmers from

I respectfully disagree. If you don't treat test code with the same respect as production code, rot sets in. Rot in the test suite discourages programmers from trusting, augmenting and maintaining it, until it eventually stops being used altogether. The most common type of rot in test code is caused by lazily copy/pasting vast blocks of setup code. The reason this is bad is that when subtle architectural changes break that setup process, somebody has to waste hours fixing 50 tests. Refactoring such code into a setUp method is the usual way of avoiding this.