Testing within the CI/CD pipeline, also known as shift-left testing, is a devops best practice that enables agile teams to continually assess the viability of new features at every stage of the development process. Running tests early and often makes it easier to catch issues before they impact your users, reduce technical debt, and foster efficient, cross-team collaboration.
Datadog Synthetic CI/CD Testing offers a flexible approach to shift-left testing that allows you to incorporate your existing Datadog Synthetic tests at any point in your CI/CD pipeline, so you can maintain a positive user experience and minimize downtime. You can use a single Synthetic test suite for a range of testing scenarios—including canary testing and testing in your CI environment—which eliminates the need for environment-specific tests. Your scheduled tests will still run against your production environment as expected, but you’ll be able to run those same tests—with whatever adjustments you see fit—on demand and at every stage of the development process.
Run Synthetic tests in your CI pipeline for earlier issue detection
The rise in popularity of the agile development methodology has made continuous integration testing crucial to the preservation of a healthy production environment. Agile teams frequently deploy new features and application improvements, so it’s critical for companies to ensure that these rapid deployments do not introduce regressions. Tests that are run within the CI pipeline must therefore reliably verify that code changes have not degraded the user experience—without impeding the team’s ability to ship changes quickly.
Traditionally, end-to-end tests have been too brittle and slow to be run in the CI pipelines of teams that ship code on a daily basis. Datadog Synthetic tests, however, are designed with reliability and efficiency in mind. Synthetic tests automatically update in response to UI changes and employ a wait and retry mechanism to ensure that failures are legitimate. And because Synthetic CI/CD Testing runs tests simultaneously rather than sequentially, it won’t slow down your development process.
Datadog’s integrations with popular CI tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, and Azure DevOps already allow you to collect events from your pipelines within the Datadog platform. Synthetic CI/CD Testing takes it a step further by enabling you to incorporate Synthetic tests in your CI pipelines for earlier issue detection. You can even view the results of Synthetic CI test runs directly within your CI, as shown in the following screenshot.
Visualize your test results in your CI/CD platform.
Adding Synthetic tests to your existing workflow is seamless. You can either send requests to a trigger endpoint and a polling endpoint or install an npm package and use the associated CLI as part of your CI build process. The CLI will autodiscover the tests to run in your repositories, execute the tests, and retrieve their results, blocking the deployment pipeline if key Synthetic tests fail in the CI environment. This helps prevent breaking changes from reaching staging or production—and safeguards the core functionality of your application by creating a safety net that only lets viable code progress through the pipeline.
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