Roadmap

CAT roadmap for this year and beyond

The following list contains the main topics we intend to integrate into CAT in the near future. We are working hard every day to make it possible.

Bear in mind that the most important inspiration for the future of CAT is you. Your feedback is the main driver of what will be implemented and when.

2024 H1

Introduce CAT Studio

  • Aim to provide best UX for test authoring and debugging ever
  • UX enhancements (like filtering tests in UI, easier execution of test subsets, …)
  • Test debugging directly from UI (run a query and see its results without leaving the GUI)
  • Community preview will be presented at SQLBits conference (March 2024).
  • CAT studio will be added to the Microsoft Store

Test Authoring from UX

  • Use CAT studio to create, change, or delete tests (in progress)
  • Users can edit tests directly from GUI, save the changes, then the CAT project file will be adjusted automatically
  • The long term goal is to leverage all CAT features from GUI, without knowledge of the underlying project file

Flexibility in Running Tests

  • Support for tags
  • Easily run any subsection of the project (not only from GUI, also from PowerShell and CAT CLI). Run whatever you need: - one specific test, test case, test suite, all tests with a tag, all tests without a tag, etc.

User Feedback

  • Better authoring experience of project files (report unexpected keywords, provide schema, etc.)
  • Tune output to relational databases (saving results to PostgreSQL, new columns)
  • Power BI reports on top of the tables with test results

2024 H2

CAT ONLINE

  • Upload tests to a new online QA platform
  • Run or schedule execution of tests
  • Keep track of all test runs including history, including all details
  • Support collaboration
  • CAT MS Azure resource in Azure Marketplace - for running your tests, easy to spin up and throw away
  • Leverage AI; machine learning powered test result analysis, etc.

New Types of Tests, Project File Enhancements

  • Set operations (such as: set is subset of another set, etc.)
  • Ability to specify expected test results directly in the test definition (“hardcoded” expectations)

New Providers

  • Examples: SAP, MySQL, MariaDB, Cosmos DB, etc.
  • Enhancements of existing providers

Test Severity

  • Users often mention the importantce of tests is not the same: some tests are critical when they fail, some should lead only to a warning
  • We’ll focus on how to handle test severity the best way, while maintaining compatibility with major DevOps platforms

2025

Important: If anything mentioned here is of high priority for you, we’ll prioritize it more. Any of the enhancements below may come earlier.

Native DevOps Platform Support

  • Deeper integration with platforms such as Azure DevOps, GitHub actions, GitLab, etc.
  • Make onboarding of CAT technology in automated pipelines even easier
  • Native “tasks” for the platforms, leverage the capabilities of the platforms to display test restuls in the best possible way

Extensibility of CAT

  • Easily add missing features to CAT with minimal code
  • Providers, expectations, outputs, etc.
  • API for extending CAT with additional functionality

Integration with Other Testing Frameworks

  • E.g., use CAT studio to manage tSQLt tests
  • Potentially integrate with other frameworks
  • API for integration of any tests

AI

  • Copilot (propose tests for your data, fix test, suggest solutions, etc.)
  • Predefined sets of tests based on industry

Linux Support

  • Many data sources live on Linux
  • We’ll provide CAT version that will run natively on major Linux distributions



This roadmap is here to share our intentions about future development of CAT. It serves no other purpose. We do NOT guarantee when (or even if) the features will be implemented and how. All information is subject to change.

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