Company
Date Published
Author
Yoann Moinet, Cecilia Watt
Word count
1497
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Frontend Developer Experience team at Datadog aimed to improve the lives of 300 frontend engineers by addressing pain points such as difficult-to-maintain acceptance tests. They identified flaky and hard-to-implement acceptance tests using Puppeteer, which were a significant challenge due to their complexity and maintenance requirements. The team decided to use Synthetic Monitoring, a product that allows recording page interactions without manual scripting, to replace the old approach. To implement this change, they created a CLI runner called `synthetics-ci` and generalized it into `datadog-ci`, which enables users to execute commands with Datadog from within CI/CD scripts. The team drove adoption through trust, information, and tooling by writing documentation, holding presentations, and working with specific teams to implement new tests. They also implemented a non-blocking job in their CI/CD pipeline to build trust among engineers without impacting the entire workflow. Through this migration process, which took over a year, the team improved one of their products, learned how to work together better, and created tools that serve the frontend community's needs.