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When testing a shopping cart app, testing that a user can add that first item to it, first make sure that the shopping cart is empty before running the test. If the cart isn't empty, delete every item in the shopping cart. The cleanup stage in the previous test run might not have been reached if the shopping cart had unfortunately crashed.
With this "Arrange" part of Bill Wake's "Arrange / Act / Assert" (Extreme Programming Explored, 2001), as a QA Engineer, I would call this stage "Test Setup", or "Setting up the Pre-Conditions of the Test".
Playwright and Cypress calls this... seeding.
... Er, what? Why do they use that term?
Hey, Claude! How come I only have heard this term in the past year or two?