devdata - Improving developer velocity and experience

Experienced developers spend a lot of time debugging and creating new bugs, and while AI won't solve all their problems, they can improve their productivity with small tactical changes. One such technique is called "devdata," which involves creating a realistic fake data generation toolto quickly and easily set up scenarios for debugging and testing.

The tool should be dynamic, able to reset to known states quickly, keep some names and credentials consistent, easy to extend, and used by the majority of the team.

The example app used in this post is a pizza SaaS product with different scenarios and personas, and the devdata command is implemented using Django-click and pytest fixtures. The benefits of using devdata include improved testing, more efficient manual testing, and increased developer velocity.