Today, the OpenFastTrace repository reached 200 stars on GitHub.
We are especially proud of this milestone because requirement tracing is still a narrow niche in software development, even more so for a non-commercial open-source tool. It is encouraging to see that OFT resonates with people who care about keeping requirements, designs, code and tests connected.
Thank you to all our users and contributors who have gone with us through more than ten years of OFT. You are the best!
Last Sunday, the OpenFastTrace team met with Prof. Dr. Oliver Kopp, Felix Gorke and Lennard Solterbeck to talk about the background, history and design of OFT. It was a good opportunity to compare notes on traceability tools and the decisions that shape them.
Felix donated the OpenFastTrace language server to the itsallcode.org organization. He originally developed it for his bachelor’s thesis, and we are very grateful that he is making it available to the community.
After feedback from our community, we have decided to release the AI skills under the MIT License.
To make this more clear, we moved the skills to a separate repository:
https://github.com/itsallcode/openfasttrace-ai-skills
Please note that we will replace the skills in the OpenFastTrace repository with a link to the new repository soon.
OpenFastTrace itself will remain licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.
AI skills often get heavily modified and customized by users, which can make it difficult to maintain a single, consistent codebase. By chosing the MIT license for the AI skills, we want to signal that we don’t expect users to contribute their modifications back to the original codebase. Of course, we still welcome improvements that everyone in the community can benefit from.
A lot happened in the world of OpenFastTrace in the last few weeks. OFT finally got its own website: https://openfasttrace.itsallcode.org. We use Jekyll to generate the site from the documentation in the OpenFastTrace repository.
We also have a draft for OFT’s own exchange and report format that will eventually replace the SpecObject format inherited from ReqM2.
Oh, and of course we have a fresh new release with 4.10.0.
But the biggest change is that we now also publish to Homebrew and have our own Debian repository so installing and updating OFT got a lot easier.
OpenFastTrace is now available from the new Itsallcode APT repository. Debian, Ubuntu, and users of other Debian-based distributions can install it through their normal package-management workflow.
OpenFastTrace 4.9.0 is the first version published there. From now on, we will publish new OFT releases as .deb packages in the repository shortly after their GitHub release.
First, install the itsallcode.org signing key and add the APT source: