I don't think having readable tests and DRY are necessarily mutually-exclusive. If you name methods and variables with lengthy but very descriptive names your t

I don't think having readable tests and DRY are necessarily mutually-exclusive. If you name methods and variables with lengthy but very descriptive names your tests can still be readable. In fact the more you modularize your setup methods the more readable they can become. For example: TestData.CreatePerson(); TestData.AddSsnToPerson(); TestData.PersonModule.checkWhetherPersonHasValidSsn(); ...is pretty readable despite being broken up. It may or may not be true that if you just went through the setup here it may be more readable, but the benefit to this approach is that you only have to write a method to add an SSN to a person object one time and then everyone can use it without needing to understand the structure of different objects. Notwithstanding readability, I would argue that DRY makes writing tests easier than cramming a bunch of setters into every test case. Once somebody understands what a setup method does, in every place that it is used in other tests the tester can skip over that part and move on to testing their specific use case.