Shipping fast without breaking things: How Retool builds reliable products

Thousands of companies, including Amazon, Lyft, Doordash, and Brex use Retool to power mission-critical processes. Customers run billing, customer support, performance evaluations, and even inventory management all on Retool.

For Retool, upholding reliability while maintaining a blazing fast developer velocity is a top priority. Engineers need to be able to ship major projects, such as the recent AI agents launch, quickly and confidently.

Challenge

Existing automation tools couldn’t keep up

Many of Retool’s most important features rely on complex infrastructure or third-party dependencies. For example, testing Source Control requires creating and connecting a GitHub account. Similarly, to thoroughly validate Retool Workflows, a stateful Temporal deployment is needed to accept and run batch jobs.

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Third-party platforms are difficult to automate in Cypress, as their UIs constantly change and often have unpredictable loading states. In addition, the complexity of these Retool features meant that Cypress scripts would be lengthy and difficult to reason about.

As the number of tests grew, they became cumbersome to author and maintain. The team simply couldn’t keep up.

Everyone dreaded the checklist

Retool’s product is constantly growing and evolving. The team looked to manual testing as a stopgap to verify correctness and maintain coverage. Hundreds of test cases were documented in a 15 page Google Doc. This checklist was executed manually by on-call engineers before every release.

The checklist was a testament to Retool's focus on quality and reliability, but it impacted velocity. The team could only release every two weeks.

Solution

I didn’t think testing could be fun

This is when the Source Control team decided to bring in Momentic. Within days the team had instrumented Retool’s most complex user journeys, no Cypress scripts or XPath required.

Engineers were impressed by Momentic’s test authoring experience. Developers could verify correctness through Momentic’s multi-modal AI and simply describe user flows in plain English. They didn’t have to open the Chrome DevTools panel every time to find a data-cy.

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By the end of the month, the team had automated over half of the manual checklist. Soon after,  the checklist was formally retired and the Source Control team reduced the release process to a single step: Run the Momentic tests.

Results

Getting to daily deploys

The Developer Experience (DevX) team drove adoption across the broader product organization. The DevX team authored, managed, and coordinated ownership of Momentic tests across several critical product areas including Permissions, Resources, and Workflows.

Over the next three months, Retool was able to completely phase out manual testing. As a result, Retool 4x’ed their release cadence, saving over 40 engineering hours per month. Now Retool releases four times a week, an incredible feat for a platform used by over half of the Fortune 500.