How We Migrated Our Acceptance Tests to Use Synthetic Monitoring

The Frontend Developer Experience team at Datadog sought to improve the lives of 300 frontend engineers by addressing pain points such as difficult-to-maintain acceptance tests. They migrated from Puppeteer (Chromium Headless Browser) to Synthetic tests, which are more robust and maintainable. The team identified pain points through surveys and addressed the flakiness of acceptance tests with a new solution using their own product, Synthetic Monitoring. They developed a CLI runner called synthetics-ci for executing Synthetic tests from the CI and later generalized it to datadog-ci. The migration process took one year, during which they gained engineers' trust in the system by providing documentation, presentations, and tooling support. They also tracked the progress of each test migration in Jira. Through this experience, the team learned valuable lessons about changing ingrained processes, working together to improve products, and building trust with users.