These days, most Rails projects use some form of factories in their test set up. What problem do they solve and why are they needed? Too much info Given a User model with first_name, last_name, and location fields, we could write a test like: describe "#full_name" do it "combines first and last name" do user = User.new( first_name: "Joël", last_name: "Quenneville", location: "Boston" ) expect(user