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Maven plugin for OFT created

Today we started a new project for creating a Maven plugin for OpenFastTrace. This will allow you to trace requirements not only with the command line and Gradle but also with Maven!

The project is still in its early stage but you can already trace requirements with the default configuration and a first integration test is working. See Pull Request #1 for the current sources. Reviews are welcome!

 

 

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Recovering JPGS from a broken file system on a flash disk

Today I want to thank the author of recoverjpg, Samuel Tardieu. This tool is proof that “do one thing, do it well” results in the most useful software.

A family member brought an SD card back from a vacation trip abroad and the filesystem broke when she plugged the card into her Mac. Needless to say that this is not the usual scenario, because many times before everything went well.

Having (partially) restored broken filesystems or at least files, I knew the drill. First rule: don’t attempt to restore on the volume that failed directly. So I created a 1:1 copy of the broken filesystem with the dd command that comes with any Linux installation.

Attempts to restore the filesystem itself failed. The structure was so broken, that fsck.vfat did not succeed. At that point I already pictured myself trying to repair parts with a hex editor. But then I found recoverjpg and it looks for typical structures that look like a JPG file without caring about the filesystem itself too much. That did the trick.

Thanks Samuel!

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Gradle plugin upgraded to OpenFastTrace 2.1.0

After releasing OpenFastTrace 2.1.0 it was high time to release the corresponding Gradle plugin in version 0.5.0. This is a drop-in update, just update the version number and benefit from the features and bugfixes of OFT 2.1.0.

During the release process we also fixed the sonar analysis and some sonar warnings.

We also used the opportunity to document (and test) two features that where already implemented but not described:

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OpenFastTrace 2.1.0 released

After two bugfix releases a new feature release. On November 19th Christoph create the Release for OpenFastTrace 2.1.0.

Feature-wise we are happy to announce an improved HTML report.

Sonar checks are now up and running again and the last JavaDoc errors have been rooted out.

We also fixed the deep coverage detection which was pointing upwards instead of downwards in the tracing chain. As a consequence we had to rework link loop detection, which acts a lot smarter now than before.

Enjoy this release, which is a huge step forward for OFT!

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On refactoring an hidden technical dept

Can you accumulate technical dept, even if you regularly clean up your sources meticulously? A short while ago I would have said that this is possible but unlikely. That was before I started taking on the migration of all of OpenFastTrace‘s unit tests from JUnit4 to JUnit5.

Like most non-trivial projects OFT accumulated quite a number of unit tests over the years and although it was always the plan to move to JUnit5 some day, they were all written for JUnit4.  With the arrival of OFT 2.0.0 — which also was a major refactoring endeavor — I felt now would be the perfect time to make that migration happen. After all I was in the refactoring flow.

To rule them all…

Shouldn’t take long, right? Boy was I mistaken. The one thing I completely underestimated was how dependent many of our integration tests were on JUnit rules like Stefan Birkner’s “JUnit System Rules“. While getting the dependencies right in the Maven POM was only slightly harder than anticipated, migrating all parts where rules were used took way longer. I quickly found a replacement for the “Temporary Folder API“: JUnit Pioneer’s “TempDirectory Extension“.

Homebrew extensions

I did not find a suitable replacement of the JUnit System Rules though, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and create the “JUnit5 System Extensions“. At the time of this writing they cover System.out, System.err and System.exit assertions.

It was a good if also painful practice for writing JUnit5 extensions. Only later I realized that Stefan seems to have started a port of his rules, but it did not look finished to me. Anyway this gave me the opportunity to dive deeper into the JUnit 5 life cycle.

Run baby, run baby, run baby, run!

Christoph was the one who pointed out to me, that the tests I wrote only ran in Eclipse but were silently skipped when triggered by Maven. The culprit was an older version of the Surefire plugin for Maven. Turns out that you need 2.22.1.

Simply beautiful

Even though the migration turned out to be much more of a pain than anticipated, especially integration tests and test that check for exceptions looks much nicer thanks to JUnit5. It’s about time for this upgrade and I am sure we won’t regret this when writing new tests.

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OpenFastTrace 2.0.0 released

This release is a big step forward. One new feature, a few small fixes and a lot of code improvements that gives us a much cleaner and more uniform API, better test coverage and lower overall complexity.

But a new API also means we had to break backward compatibility to achieve something that the existing API would not allow since it had a separation of report and export mode: you can now reuse an import that already ran to create both reports and exports from it without redoing the import. This is a considerable speed-up (and we call the project OpenFastTrace for a reason. Runtime efficiency was and will always be one of our main design principles.

You can find examples of how to use the API in the user guide and in OFTs own code of course.

Thanks to Christoph for his patience during his review of the giant change set that the API rework caused!

Enjoy the new and improved API.

Happy tracing.