Hardcoding test data is just like hardcoding anything in a software; a quick and dirty fix that will forever haunt your nightmares. In Chapter 3, Refactoring Tests, we refactored out some bad practices from our tests. We, however, left test data still hardcoded in the tests. Let's take a look at how each piece of the test data can make our life difficult:
URL of the website: Like most web projects, we have several testing environments: staging, localhost, development, and so on. Our tests have the URL of the application hardcoded; thus, without changing the test code, we cannot have the tests execute on both the staging and production environments.
Hardcoded product: Typically, different test environments do not share the same identical data such as products. Furthermore, most environments will only have a subset of the products available in production. Test environments in particular will have products that never did and never will exist in production.
Private user...