Here's what's next for the Tracetest OTel tracing test tool

We [released Tracetest](https://github.com/kubeshop/tracetest) to the public last week. Yay! But what is next?

Our team worked really hard to release the initial MVP version of Tracetest.  

## Utilizing OpenTelemetry Tracing

Did you hear about our release? In short - Tracetest allows you to utilize the Opentelemetry distributing tracing manual instrumentation to do deep integration and end-to-end testing…easily. You can read about it in the last blog post,  [“Introducing Tracetest - Trace-based Testing with OpenTelemetry”](https://kubeshop.io/blog/introducing-tracetest-trace-based-testing-with-opentelemetry).

It was a ‘soft launch’, as the initial release is more of a prototype than a product. We are fans of Marty Cagan’s thoughts about delivering quickly by starting with a Minimal Viable Prototype rather than Product, so we focused on making the first version show the complete flow and enable us to solicit feedback. 

In spite of the ‘prototype’ nature, we were blown away by the reception & great comments we received via Slack and our [Kubeshop Discord channel](https://discord.gg/eBvEQRVyKX):

* “I'm an OTel maintainer. I saw y'all tweet about this and it looks dope!” -Austin 

* “I watched [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMRicNlaehc) and it’s a really cool idea!” -Matt

* “We took a look at this in the past day or two and I have to say, we're very interested in this product.” -Dustin

The team was pumped to hear the comments, so we dove back into planning the next major release, which will be a true MVP. Our motto is - **We are going to put the ‘Product’ into ‘MVP’**.  We came up with a simple measure to decide if the tool can be declared a ‘Product’ - _we have to be able to test Tracetest’s multiple services with Tracetest_. [Dogfooding](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/30784/dogfooding#:~:text=The%20term%20%22dogfooding%22%20is%20an,is%20confident%20about%20its%20products.) our own product.

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With that goal in mind, we compiled a list of the capability we all wanted to add, combined it into a list, filtered it down to a smaller list, conducted a prioritization exercise, and, from that exercise, decided on a core set of capabilities to add.  Many of these are ‘meat and potatoes’ - basics the product must have to be functional. Some of the highlights include:

* Moving the assertion engine to the backend (Golang) & enabling tests to be run on a CI pipeline.

* A full revamp of the UX.

* Improving our selector logic that allows spans to be accurately targeted in a non-brittle manner.

As an OSS project, we are developing in public, so you can follow our progress. We have a [milestone titled MVProduct](https://github.com/kubeshop/tracetest/milestone/2) with a due date of June 7th, and the team has already dived into the development.

## How can you help?  

There are a few ways:  

1) Tell us how you would like to use the product via our [Slack community](https://dub.sh/tracetest-community), what you would like to see in it, and the direction you would like us to take in the future.  

2) Try it out! We have a public demo at [demo.tracetest.io](https://demo.tracetest.io). We will be updating it as we code, so it will be getting better and better over the next month as we progress.

3) Talk to us directly. I am available on [Slack](https://dub.sh/tracetest-community), on the CNCF or o11y slack (Ken Hamric).  I will be looking for teams to talk to about their use case. 

In return for your time, I can promise undying gratitude, possibly a shirt in the future (TODO!), and rapid response from the dev team in translating your needs into working code.

Thanks for your interest, and please give us a star on [Github](https://github.com/kubeshop/tracetest)!
— The Tracetest Team