Xen Project Summit 2024

Requirements define your product. They ensure that the user needs are met. OpenFastTrace (OFT) verifies the integrity of a product's requirement structure, thus avoiding the costs of common mistakes like forgetting to implement requirements or to remove obsolete ones. OFT crawls specification documents and code and correlates them with the help of special unique IDs. In OFT requirements are treated like code, because if there is one thing that software makers excel at, it's handling code. Managing requirement documents like code allows using the same tried and true tools for version control and reviews. The main authoring formats are Markdown and reStructuredText. They are simple, ubiquitous and robust. You can bet, you will still be able to read them in 50 years from now. Annotations in comments of test and implementation tell OFT what is covered where in the code. The Xen functional safety project uses OFT to track requirements with test specs and tests. The traceability report shows full bidirectional links from the market requirements to the test jobs.