As most testers know, data management is important to testing. For automated testing, this importance increases significantly. Testers need the correct data in the system in order to elicit the desired response. While manual testers can make adjustments on the fly to the system under test, automated tests are much pickier. If the system isn’t in a completely set and known state, the outcome of some actions might be the correct one, but interpreted by the automated scripts as the wrong one. Max Saperstone will discuss several different tactics used in real-world scenarios that were effective in managing test data. These include: preparing systems for testing, designing tests to be idempotent, and data management techniques to allow multiple tests to run in parallel without conflict. He will cover the Arrange Act Assert pattern, and how that can be used for more effective tests, along with different ways to seed and manage test data.