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I don't think that qualifies as non-determinism. This is just dependencies between operations.

Non-determinism would be, for example, something that's time-sensitive. If some result varies by time, then the only way to test it is to include time as a parameter. This can be complicated if the time variable plays into asynchronous updates (e.g. you want to test that a POST update worked, but it's actually eventually consistent). Caching (e.g. through Varnish or a CDN) would be another thing to make such tests much more complicated.

Another example is an API that has side effects. For example, a stock trading API might read real time quotes from another service. A stock trade then alters the next quote.



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