Most teams still treat manual test cases as rows in a SaaS database. That worked when cases were written slowly, reviewed rarely, and automation lived in a separate silo.
It works less well now.
AI can draft cases from screenshots and user stories in minutes. Automation lives next to application code. QA and dev share the same PRs. Auditors ask where test data lives and who changed what.
In that world, test cases are data — and the format you choose matters as much as the tool UI.
The durable direction is tests as code: plain YAML files in version control, with a thin local layer for humans to browse, run, and review. Not because databases are evil, but because git + YAML matches how we already work with code, AI, and compliance.
