Why do QA Engineers call it 'Test Setup' while DEVs call it 'Seeding'? - Conversations with Claude.ai

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? Claude's Response If you have been working in QA automation for a while and only started hearing the term "seeding" in the last year or two, you are not behind. You are encountering a developer-community term that has crossed over into QA conversations only recently, carried in by a n