The previous blog post was published more than one year ago. That’s why it’s high time for an update. We where busy in the last weeks preparing some new releases for you!

# OpenFastTrace 3.0.2

This major release contains these changes:

• The project now requires Java 11 for building and running.
• We re-structured the packages to have unique package names for each submodule. This is a precondition for Java 9 modules which we will introduce later.
• The tag importer now supports many more file types, e.g. for C, C++, SQL and many more.

# OpenFastTrace Maven Plugin 0.1.0

This is the first release we recommend for production use as we added integration tests for real use cases. We upgraded to the latest OFT release and introduced a feature to optionally fail the build when tracing finds an error.

We are happy to announce the latest release 2.3.5 of OpenFastTrace.

In this release we split the source code into sub-modules for api, importers, exporters etc. This has some advantages:

• The dependencies of plugins are now enforced by the compiler. It is not possible that e.g. the specobject exporter depends on the specobject importer.
• Developers who want to extend OFT with custom importers or exporters only need add a dependency for the stable API module without all the other internal code.
• A stable API simplifies internal refactoring of the code because third party plugins only depend on the API module. All other modules are internal and can be changed without breaking third party plugins.

I also should mention some caveats. Building the project now takes around 3 minutes, deployment to JCenter even 9 minutes.

To keep track of my working time I wrote a little time recording tool called White Rabbit. You can find it at https://github.com/itsallcode/white-rabbit.

Today I found a nice hint on a Cygwin forum on how to debug slow Bash auto-completion:

set -vx

What that does is that it make all the steps visible that the completion uses to come to a result.  No you just have to look if one sticks out especially.

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!