Also, one neat thing I saw done at Spotify was a "Test Data Service." This service's job was to abstract away concrete test data from its qualities.  This was mostly used to acquire test users, thus allowing testers to declaratively acquire test data.  For example, you could say "I want a free user with X flags" or "I want a premium user who has tracks in their starred playlist."  The service's other job was to lock users to prevent parallel tests from corrupting a shared test user's state (also resulting in a false negative).

We might want something similar for retrieving and locking test articles for editing, but this might not be necessary if our vagrant/virtualization infrastructure is mature enough to ensure tests are isolated.