CI setup for a new React Native project is a tedious trial&error process. Let’s talk about how we can make it simpler.

A modern web application probably makes tens of network calls during a typical user flow.

A good end-to-end web test must observe and in some cases mock the network calls to make the test reliable, complete, and easy to debug. I will show some of my tips and tricks for using and controlling network API calls during tests. We will see how Cypress, Playwright, and Vitest implement network spies and stubs, and what we can achieve by writing just a little bit of custom code on top of existing features.

Despite the emergency of DevOps, software engineers and SREs still use different tools to achieve similar means. Case in point: Synthetic Monitoring versus E2E Testing. We can combine forces and use the same tool for both production monitoring and testing within CI.

In this talk, I will discuss how Synthetic Monitoring and E2E Testing are two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, I shall show how production monitoring and development testing can be achieved using Playwright JS, GitHub Actions and Elastic Synthetics.

Are tests a chore, or do they help us move faster? Let’s examine what makes testing great and not so great. We’ll focus on test strategies that help us code with confidence and clarity, and where they can cost us time and energy. The secret to good testing lies in how it shapes our developer experience. Do our tests give us useful feedback in a timely manner? How quickly can we tell what is wrong when a test suite fails? Do they document our features and explain our past decisions? We’ll answer these questions with better tests that give us joy.