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QATrack+ Status Update

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Randle Taylor

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Jan 23, 2025, 9:42:57 AMJan 23
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Hi all,

While the writing has been on the wall for some time now, I want to formally announce that I can no longer contribute to the QATrack+ codebase. Despite my best intentions and hopes that I could continue to work on QATrack+, balancing family commitments, career, and open-source projects has proven unworkable.

When I joined Radformation to work on RadMachine, initially our plan was to develop QATrack+ in parallel. While this was feasible at first, as RadMachine grew and our team expanded, it became increasingly difficult for me to manage both projects. As a result, my contributions to QATrack+ effectively ceased. In contrast, James Kerns’ open source project Pylinac, used in both QATrack+ and RadMachine, continues to thrive, gaining more power and features month after month. This difference is at least in part because the RadMachine code-base diverged from QATrack+ while Pylinac stayed as a single codebase. Radformation has been very supportive of both our open source projects and I’m thankful to them for that.

What does this mean for your clinic?

QATrack+ will remain available “as-is,” without any guarantee of future updates. It will continue to function as it always has, and if your clinic is among the 100’s using it, it will remain useful for as long as you choose. That said, without active maintenance, QATrack+ now enters a legacy state. Your organization should consider what that means for its QA workflow and IT policies.

For those seeking an actively maintained solution, RadMachine is a direct descendant of QATrack+, offering regular updates, new and improved features and bug fixes, and a wonderful dedicated support team. We can also seamlessly import your existing QATrack+ database into RadMachine. If interested, please consider scheduling a demo: https://radformation.com/radmachine/radmachine/.

What’s next for QATrack+?

  • GitHub & Codebase: The GitHub repository will be updated to reflect that QATrack+ is no longer actively maintained. If anyone wishes to take over the project or gain commit rights, please post here or contact me at ra...@randlet.com.  Ideally this would be a clinic or group who have resources and time to dedicate to maintaining the codebase.  Forking the project and modifying it for your own needs is also always an option.

  • qatrackplus.com:, I will continue hosting the qatrackplus.com website for the time being. However, the demo server—requiring time and resources to maintain—will be taken down. 

  • Google Group: For now this group will remain “active”. I am still happy to reply to emails here as time permits (special thanks to Thomas Bezold who has picked up my slack here!)

A personal note

It’s bittersweet to step away from QATrack+, which has been central to my life for 13 years. When we discussed internally at The Ottawa Hospital whether to build our own QA software, one of the central pitches that helped sell the idea was that by open-sourcing our software, we could attract a community of developers who would help maintain and develop it. Despite the efforts of several dedicated individuals, we have never achieved our goal of a consistent and thriving development community, and I feel a great deal of disappointment in leaving the project without a clear succession plan.

On the other hand, QATrack+, and now RadMachine, have been more successful than I ever could have imagined when we first started thinking about how we could improve our QA data management at The Ottawa Hospital. Seeing software I wrote being used in 20+ countries and hundreds of clinics around the world is truly humbling. I’m immensely grateful to all the users, contributors, and colleagues who shaped this project, including Crystal Angers, James Kerns, Ryan Bottema, the outside contributors to the open-source project, and many others.

Thanks to all of you for your support over the last 13 years and your understanding about my decision to step away from the project at this time.

Randy


Cody Crewson

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Jan 28, 2025, 12:45:34 PMJan 28
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Randle

I wish the best of luck to you and your family. Thank you for all of your hard work over these 13 years. 

tbe...@gmail.com

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Jan 29, 2025, 5:36:18 AMJan 29
to QATrack+
Hi Randy,

I wish you all the best, thanks for the great software and all the free support you have been providing. I always hoped to get one more django update but am glad that we are still able to move to radformation.

regards
Thomas

Ash Cullen

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Feb 10, 2025, 6:57:36 PM (8 days ago) Feb 10
to QATrack+
Hi Randy,

All the best with your future career at Radformation. Thank you for making such a valuable tool that has improved our field immensely and of course for releasing it for free into the wild.

Thankyou also for being so generous with your time in helping me (and so many others) over the years with various technical issues.

While I understand not every clinic may have the financial resources to do so, I work at one of the fortunate ones who have recently made the transition to RadMachine and am very pleased our QATrack+ journey continues in its new form. In saying that, I feel whatever happens, QATrack+ will continue to remain a very useful tool at the many centres who use it.

While I never made any meaningful contributions beyond some minor updates to QCPump to support MPC on TB v3+, I do now miss being able to peek at the Python source code to see "how did he do that".

Regards,
Ash
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