title: Pluses and minuses of using Factories in a Rails test suite?
body: <p>I'm currently looking at a hefty Rails test suite.  It's nothing I can get into specifics about, but the run time for the entire suite (unit/functional/some integration) can run upward of 5 minutes.</p>
  
  <p>We're completely reliant on fixtures and are we're not mocking and stubbing as much as we should be.</p>
  
  <p>Our next few sprints are going to be completely focused on the test suite, both improving coverage, writing better tests and most importantly writing more efficient tests.</p>
  
  <p>So aside from more mocking and stubbing within our tests, we're considering replacing our fixtures with most likely Factory Girl.  I see a lot of happy folks doing similar situations but haven't been able to find a good resource on any minuses of moving to a factory.  I have seen some slower benchmarks when using benchmarks from various resources but cannot find a definitive this why factories are good and this is why you might not want to use them.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone educate me on why or why I shouldn't be using factories?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>