Best practices for creating end-to-end tests

Testing plays a crucial role in the development process as it helps detect broken functionality before customers do. Two main categories of testing are pre-production and post-production. The shift-left model, which involves verifying functionality earlier in the development cycle, is gaining popularity to find and fix issues faster. This approach can incorporate various types of tests, including unit, API, and browser tests. Creating meaningful test coverage requires identifying commonly used application workflows and prioritizing them over less popular ones. Tools like real user monitoring (RUM) can help determine the most important user journeys to include in end-to-end (E2E) test suites. It is also essential to create tests for flows that are not frequently used but are still critical to users' experience. To build efficient and meaningful tests, teams should follow best practices such as breaking workflows into smaller, focused tests, creating meaningful assertions, building adaptable tests, and maintaining the state of applications with idempotent tests. Additionally, organizing test suites by testing environments and using metadata to categorize tests can help manage large test suites effectively. Finally, creating notifications that enable teams to respond faster is crucial for addressing issues promptly. Datadog's CI integration and built-in HTTP request steps can further streamline the process of testing code before it reaches staging or production environments.