What tool quickly spins up a virtual machine for integration and acceptance testing?

The correct answer focuses on Vagrant, which is specifically designed to create and manage virtualized environments easily and efficiently. Vagrant allows developers to set up and tear down environments quickly, making it ideal for integration and acceptance testing. By using a consistent configuration, Vagrant ensures that the development, testing, and production environments can be replicated with minimal discrepancies, thus promoting stable and reliable testing procedures.

Vagrant’s capability to automate the provisioning and management of virtual machines means that developers can focus on writing tests and developing software rather than spending time on environment setup. This speed and ease of use are essential for quick iteration during the testing process.

In contrast, while Terraform is a powerful infrastructure as code tool primarily used for provisioning cloud infrastructure such as virtual machines and resources, it focuses on managing infrastructure rather than providing the rapid and repeatable environment setup specifically for testing purposes. Docker enables the creation and management of containerized applications, which are lightweight and can be beneficial for certain types of testing but operates on a different paradigm compared to full virtual machines. Chef is primarily a configuration management tool that automates server deployment and configuration, which might be used in conjunction with a tool like Vagrant, but it doesn't directly facilitate the rapid spinning up of virtual machines for testing.