OpenFastTrace (short OFT) is a requirement management and tracing suite. Requirement tracing keeps track of whether you actually implemented everything you planned to in your specifications. It also identifies obsolete parts of your product and helps you to get rid of them.

You can learn more about requirement tracing and how to use OpenFastTrace in the user guide.

Below you see a screenshot of an HTML tracing report where OFT traces itself. You see a summary followed by a detail view of the traced requirements.

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User Guides and Tools

• 📖 User Guide
• 📚 Terminology
• 🔌 Extending OpenFastTrace With Plugins
• 💲 Command Line Usage
• 🛠 IntelliJ Plugin (PyCharm, Clion, etc.)
• 🤖 Agent Skills
• 🛡️ Security Policy
• ♻️ Project Lifecycle and Deprecations

News and Discussions

• 🌐 Homepage
• 📢 Blog
• ➕ Changelog
• 📅 Upcoming Milestones
• 🗨️ Discussion Board
• 🐘 [email protected]
• ✨ OpenFastTrace Stories
• ℹ️ About us

Information for Contributors

• 🎟️ Project Board
• 🦮 Developer Guide
• 🔌 Plugin Developer Guide
• 🎁 Contributing Guide
• 🤝 Code of Conduct
• 🤖 AI Agent Guide
• 💡 System Requirements
• 👜 Design

Demos and Presentations

• 📹 Introduction Video (YouTube, 3:30 minutes)
• 🛗 Elevator pitch
• 📽️ OpenFastTrace Presentation (LibreOffice, 20 minutes)
• 🎬 OpenFastTrace Live Demo Script (Markdown, 1 hour)

If you want to use OFT, you have the choice between using it as part of your build process — typically with Maven or Gradle. Or you can run OFT from the command line.

Check the user guide for detailed information on how to use OpenFastTrace.

OpenFastTrace 4.0.0 and above only needs a Java 17 (or later) runtime environment to run. OpenFastTrace until version 3.x.x supported Java 11. Versions prior to that ran with Java 8. Note that only the latest version of OFT is actively supported.

You can get OFT via our Debian APT repository, through Homebrew, as Maven plugin or Gradle plugin. Or you can get the jar archive via releases on GitHub.

Check the chapter about Installation in the user guide for details.

The most basic variant to run OpenFastTrace is directly from the JAR file via the command line:

java -jar product/target/openfasttrace-4.10.0.jar trace /path/to/directory/being/traced

If you want to run OFT automatically as part of a continuous build, we recommend using our plugins for Gradle and Maven.

For more details about how to run OFT please consult the user guide.

If you want to run OFT in a CI build, you can use the OFT wrapper script oftw.sh. The script only requires Java 17 and Maven and downloads the OFT JAR from Maven Central if it is not yet available in the local Maven repository $HOME/.m2/repository.

If you want to learn how to build OpenFastTrace, please check our Developer Guide.

You would like to contribute to OFT? Please check out our Contributor Guide to get started.