Building a platform to enable the future

Collective.work is a SaaS-enabled marketplace that connects companies to collectives of freelancers. Paul Vidal, CTO and co-founder at Collective.work, founded the company to make it easier for teams of freelancers to collaborate without requiring them to manage administrative tasks like splitting payments. “Collective.work is a way of organizing this new, more collaborative way of working,” says Vidal. “It's about enabling a world where freelancers can team up and work together easily.

When Vidal launched Collective in 2021, his priorities were to ensure the site was highly resilient and offered an excellent user experience to support the high volume of transactions between freelancers and clients. Vidal knew that implementing testing at all levels, including synthetic browser tests and continuous testing, was key to ensuring performance and detecting issues quickly. However, some of the existing tools available to accomplish those objectives lacked functionality and ease of setup.

“Most people use open source tools, but the existing ones didn’t allow me to scale fast or iterate quickly,” says Vidal. “Open source solutions also require setup, which is not something I wanted to spend time on.”

Creating a comprehensive QA process

When Vidal saw Datadog’s Synthetic Monitoring and Continuous Testing in action, he was impressed. “Datadog Continuous Testing was easy to use and enabled us to move super fast,” he says. “Creating a test with the UI is fast and we wanted to spend as little time as possible on that. Maintaining the testing infrastructure is problematic, and Datadog did that for us, so we didn’t have to do it on our own.”

Collective now uses Datadog Synthetic Monitoring and Continuous Testing to automatically run end-to-end tests on multiple complex workflows throughout pre- and post-production. Testing in pre- and post-production environments allows the team to prevent bugs in production and ensure the platform is functioning as expected. For example, when a freelancer submits a payment request, that request initiates a workflow that includes asking the client to approve the work, generating an invoice, and processing the payment. Ensuring that workflow performs as expected means freelancers get paid for their work quickly and Collective clients have an easy and intuitive way to pay freelancers.

“Datadog acts as my QA,” says Vidal. “If a Datadog test passes in the CI, I’m 100 percent confident we can ship to production and that things will go well.”

Using Datadog Synthetic Monitoring and Continuous Testing also enables Vidal to keep costs low by eliminating the need to hire a full-time QA team. “Datadog makes testing easy. It's a well-integrated frontend development process and it's super easy to set up and run a test,” says Vidal. “And if I do hire a QA team eventually, it will make their jobs so much easier.”

Vidal also appreciates that Datadog enables users to build a single test suite they can use throughout the development cycle and then to monitor apps once they are in production.

A unified platform simplifies testing and monitoring

In addition to testing, Datadog’s unified platform enables Vidal to collect different types of data to augment monitoring and troubleshooting. For example, Vidal uses Datadog Log Management to quickly investigate and troubleshoot issues, Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) for end-to-end visibility into user journeys, and Session Replay to capture and visually replay users’ web browsing experiences for review, analysis, and troubleshooting.

“I like that Datadog is a unified platform that combines all my data in one place,” he says. “The more products you use, the more value you get for the money because the products integrate and you can troubleshoot easily.”

Increasing speed, reducing bugs

Datadog Continuous Testing has enabled Collective to reduce bugs when they refactor or upgrade a library. Using Datadog also allows Vidal to increase the number of tests he’s producing. “We're running two times more tests than before,” he says.

Datadog Continuous Testing also enables Vidal to run the volume of tests he wants to run simultaneously and allows him to deploy new features continuously without hiring additional full-time engineers, reducing lengthy onboarding and technical barriers and enabling the company to do more with less. “The value you get with Datadog is unparalleled,” says Vidal. “It simplifies the process while saving a lot of time.”

Ultimately, Vidal says using Datadog Continuous Testing and Synthetic Monitoring allows him to ship new features three times as fast as before with fewer bugs. “The Collective platform is super resilient thanks to Datadog,” he says. “I'm very happy with it.”