  The long-term, high precision photometry delivered by the Transiting
Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) enables us to gain new insight into known and
hitherto well-studied stars. In this paper, we present the result of our TESS
study of the photospheric activity of the rapid rotator AB Doradus. Due to its
favorable position near the southern ecliptic pole, the TESS satellite recorded
almost 600 rotations of AB Doradus with high cadence, allowing us to study
starspots and flares on this ultra-active star. The observed peak-to-peak
variation of the rotational modulations reaches almost 11 %, and we find that
the starspots on AB Doradus show highly preferred longitudinal positions. Using
spot modeling, we measured the positions of the active regions on AB Doradus
and we find that preferred spot configurations should include large regions
extending from low to high stellar latitudes. We interpret the apparent
movement of spots as the result of both differential rotation and spot
evolution and argue that the typical spot lifetimes should range between 10 and
20 days. We further find a connection between the flare occurrence on AB
Doradus and the visibility of the active regions on its surface, and we finally
recalculated the star's rotation period using different methods and we compared
it with previous determinations.
