Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, recently I had reason to look into the teardown method (DatabaseCleaner, dontchaknow), and I never did find anything conclusive that it was something that test-unit used. Sure, it was mentioned in many many DatabaseCleaner questions/answers/threads, but nothing I could really rely on since invariably these were also using Rspec. That is, my unanswered question was "Is teardown solely an Rspec thing?"
Setup and teardown are in the Rails testing guide. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html#setup-and-teardow...
I suppose so, but the readability of the guides are an (perhaps-idiosyncratic) issue for me.