Optimizing Our E2E Pipeline
In the world of DevOps and Developer Experience (DevXP), speed and efficiency can make a big difference on an engineer’s day-to-day tasks. Today, we’ll dive into how Slack’s DevXP team took some existing tools and used them to optimize an end-to-end (E2E) testing pipeline. This lowered build times and reduced redundant processes, saving both time and resources for engineers at Slack. The Problem: Unnecessary Frontend Builds For one of our largest code repositories (a monolithic repository, or monorepo), Slack has a CI/CD pipeline that runs E2E tests before merging code into the main branch. This is critical for ensuring that changes are validated across the entire stack for the Slack application: frontend, backend, database, and the handful of services in between. However, we noticed a bottleneck: building the frontend code was taking longer than expected and occurred too frequently, even when there were no frontend-related changes. Here’s the breakdown: ...