Retrospectiva: Open Source Project Management Rails App
Retrospectiva is a new open-source project management tool built as a Rails application. It's interesting from two angles: first, as a project management tool, as it was designed; but secondly as a large, well built Rails 2.3 app to learn from.
Retrospectiva is a solid example of a rare sort of open source Rails project: one that's well presented, user friendly, and solidly developed. It has a well designed homepage with lots of screenshots and feature guides, and there's even a single step installation process so you can get up and running from a single line at your Terminal. Give it a shot:
wget -O - http://retrospectiva.org/download/script/remote/retrospectiva_installer.rb | ruby
Note: If you have an error like
undefined method `destroy' for #Svn::Ext::Core::Apr_pool_wrapper_toccur, then download the above installer, go into the newly createdretrospectivadirectory and addSCM_SUBVERSION_ENABLED = falseas the first line inconfig/environment.rb. Then runretrospectiva_installer.rbdirectly and installation will complete. I found this necessary to complete on OS X Snow Leopard.
November 18th, 2009 at 1:08 am
I've used Retrospectiva and I highly recommend it. I stopped using it for awhile as I switched to using Git, and it hadn't added support yet, but I'll be giving it another go now.
November 18th, 2009 at 8:36 am
How does it compare to Redmine?
November 18th, 2009 at 10:06 am
We just started using Retrospectiva and have only good things to say about it as well. You mentioned the dead-easy setup, it's easy to get going after the setup as well and there are sensible defaults - in contrast to RedMine that drove me crazy when setting it up. Additionally, the creator Dimitrij is very involved and helps out with questions quickly on the mailing list.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:12 am
Hi Peter,
As I run a Project Management website, I am well aware of dozens of PM tools. From a software developer's perspective, I can see the excitement, but from a Project Manager's perspective, what does Retrospectiva offer that other PM tools do not offer?
November 19th, 2009 at 12:16 am
@PM Hut: I don't have a rash of experience with project management tools, so unfortunately you'd need to look at their site and the list of features to get a feel for that.
November 19th, 2009 at 7:31 am
I'm not overly impressed. At first sight, It looks quite polished, on second site, it looks as if it still has way to go until it can compete with redmine. Yeah, sure, setup is easy, but so is the setup for redmine - you don't have a one-click installer (but you can several ec2-images if all you want to do is try it out), but you will have to do a manual install for prodcution anyway - and that's not much different to the redmine-install.
November 20th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
"Note: If you have an error like undefined method `destroy' for #Svn::Ext::Core::Apr_pool_wrapper_t occur, then download the above installer, go into the newly created retrospectiva directory and add SCM_SUBVERSION_ENABLED = false as the first line in config/environment.rb. Then run retrospectiva_installer.rb directly and installation will complete. I found this necessary to complete on OS X Snow Leopard."
I'm under 10.6.2 and try to install retrospectiva... the workaround isn't working.
Running retrospectiva_installer.rb download the whole project again, in the project folder. :-/
November 20th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Download retrospectiva_install.rb back at where you started, not inside the project where you're left after the error. That way, the change you made to config/environment.rb is respected :-)
November 21st, 2009 at 1:56 am
/me makes a note to add a single step installer to Redmine.
I thought Retrospectiva was a few years old through? Or am I thinking about another project? There was a pretty Trac clone that started back in 2005.
November 21st, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Eric is correct...Retrospectiva is far from new. It was started in late 2006 as a fork of another Rails Trac clone...Collaboa.
December 25th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Interesting. I'm going to give this thing a try.
January 27th, 2010 at 3:58 am
Interesting discussion. I'm going to check this one out.
February 24th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
It's a great tool but far away from other solutions like RedMine or Pivotal Traker.