Cattle Suite: enterprise test automation, open-sourced by Dell.

A distributed test automation and performance tracking platform built for Dell’s proprietary server caching hardware — and open-sourced by Dell when the division wound down.

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Context

Proprietary hardware, industrial-scale testing

Dell’s server caching hardware had to be validated continuously: every branch, every commit, every build, across fleets of test machines. At that scale, test automation stops being a script and becomes a platform — something that schedules runs, parses logs, tracks performance over time, and tells engineers the truth about what changed.

Cattle Suite was that platform, built by founder Joseph Dattilo during his time as a senior software engineer at Dell.

Constraint

Distributed, continuous, and trusted

The hard part of enterprise test infrastructure is not running a test — it is coordinating thousands of them across machines while keeping the results trustworthy. The platform had to manage builds and test runs across a distributed harness, survive flaky hardware, and reduce mountains of log output into performance reporting engineers would act on.

What We Built

A central dashboard for the whole pipeline

  • check_circle Build and test-run management — branches, commits, builds, and runs coordinated across machines at scale.
  • check_circle Log parsing — raw output turned into structured, searchable results.
  • check_circle Performance reporting — hardware performance tracked over time, regressions surfaced.
  • check_circle Situation reports — a central dashboard giving the team one view of the whole harness.
What It Runs Today

Public code, public record

When Dell wound down the division, they open-sourced the complete codebase — published in 2016 under Dell’s OpenPastures release. The code is public on GitHub today under the GPL-3.0 license, which makes this the rare case study you can read line by line.

Stack

The platform’s core

Node.jsPythonExpressPostgreSQL
Verify It

Check the claims yourself

Enterprise-grade discipline, small-team shape.

The same engineering that ran Dell’s test fleets now ships operational software for businesses that outgrew their tools.

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