2026 marks a special milestone for OpenFastTrace: it has been a bit more than 10 years since the first commit was pushed to GitHub!
While OFT as we know it today started in 2016, its roots go back much further. The journey began in 2003 with a tool called ‘ReqMgr’ at 3SOfT GmbH. Over the years, it evolved through various iterations—ReqMgrNG, ReqM2, and Allosaurus—driven by the needs of the automotive industry for reliable requirement tracing.
Two things happened recently that I think are worth mentioning: OFT got an IntelliJ plugin, and we added several skill files for AI coding agents.
Running OFT during development should be as seamless as possible. While we have had build integration for a long time via our Maven and Gradle plugins, many developers still found themselves dropping to the command line to check tracing results. That is fine for a final check before a commit, but during active development, it can interrupt your flow.
Our next goal is to get OFT packaged for easier installation. We will start with Debian and RPM packages soon. Ultimately, we would like to get OFT shipped with the popular distributions. This will probably help with the adoption. But until that happens, it will be a long way.
By the way, if you read this and are a curious developer with experience in the Apple ecosystem, we are looking for help with packaging OFT for macOS. If you are interested, please reach out to us.
Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
— Ed Murphy (not really, the original quote was a bit different)
Finally, we managed to get a new release of OFT out of the door.
While 4.2.2 is only a bugfix and security release, it also inherits a new feature from 4.2.1. Why do I mention that?
Although the feature set change for version 4.2.0 is not that big, that was the most painful release we had so far.
To understand the rant that is about to follow, one must know that this year Sonatype changed the way releases are deployed to the Central repository (formerly known as Maven Central).
Nothing wrong with doing that per se, since the old mechanism was quite clunky, and I imagine, also caused some trouble on Sonatype’s side. The announcement came around the end of 2024, and the deadline for the migration was the last of May 2025. So far so fair.