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.

Today we released version 0.4.0 of the OpenFastTrace Gradle plugin. This is the first version that can be considered production ready. It was successfully integrated into a real life commercial project using the following features:

• Software architecture design (Swad) imported as a dependency from a maven repository
• Software detailed design (Swdd) written in MarkDown
• Coverage tags in code (long format) for item types src, utest and stest
• Filter requirements from Swad, Swdd and Code using a artifact type filter
• Filter Swad requirements relevant for the project using a tag filter
• Generate a tracing report in text format containing failure details
• Additionally, to the report we export the requirements in Specobject format that can be delivered to integration for creating an overall tracing report

Only minor adaptions were required and OFT works in parallel to the proprietary tracing tool. It is just must faster! 😉

Starting today we will provide a growing set of Eclipse templates to help speed-up writing OpenFastTrace specifications using the Eclipse IDE. Using these templates also has the nice side-effect of reducing the chance for errors when writing specifications.

Find the templates here: https://github.com/itsallcode/openfasttrace-eclipse-templates

We already publish openfasttrace to JCenter, see openfasttrace distribution. Using libraries from JCenter in a Gradle build only requires adding repositories { jcenter() } to your build.gradle.

You can do the same with maven by adding the following to your pom.xml:

<repositories>
  <repository>
    <id>central</id>
    <name>bintray</name>
    <url>http://jcenter.bintray.com</url>
  </repository>
</repositories>

But we want to make it even easier for maven users by publishing our artifacts to the Maven Central repository which maven uses by default.

The easiest way to publish to Maven Central is synchronization via bintray. The setup process is not trivial, so I want to share my experience.

Today Christoph and me released version 1.1.0 of OpenFastTrace. The most notable feature addition is that you now can opt to keep specification items without tags when configuring the tag filter.