Dummy System

https://github.com/primait/dummy-system aims to free Developers from writing e2e and let this be done by Product people. To achieve this, tests can be defined with Gherkin syntax. It uses Robot Framework, Playwright and Requests under the hood. It is also an attempt to shift left for the test paradigm. Without going into details about the tool implementation and functionalities, we think that an E2E test approach, even if could be tempting from a developer perspective, could lead to bloated, slow and flaky test suites. This means low trust in the tool, and its eventual decommission.

We put dummy system on assess because we still need to prove if there is fit for a tool like this between smoke tests provided by Datadog synthetic tests, and integration/contract testing on the other side, which are normally faster and more reliable than E2E tests. There could be also a huge difference between the domains, as having a proper E2E test pipeline on the developer machine could be very valuable for teams having to deal specifically with frontend (namely leads), but the problems of bloating and slowness still stands.