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Pain with XPlanner

software development

While XPlanner looked like a good solution for my problem, reality intruded when I got a 2 hour window to play around with it. It requires MySQL and a servlet container (Tomcat). In about 90 minutes on Friday I got it up and running.

Today I tried to setup a sample project or two with iterations, user stories and tasks. All of that seems to work fine. The problem would be that I can’t actually add team members and assign them to a project, a fairly significant problem. I went with blaming it on myself, until I came across a very similar bug. Apparently the fix is that after adding users you sometimes need to restart Tomcat. Unfortunately that didn’t work for me and the bug isn’t listed as resolved.

Next step was to drop back a version and try it. Unfortunately, the same problem, I can’t assign a person to a team. Next try is pulling the snapshot down from the Subversion repository. Or maybe I just fall back to the old excel spreadsheet.

Ed Gibbs @ August 13, 2005

« Experimenting with XPlanner $500 Barrier to IntelliJ Entry »

4 Comments

  1. Tim August 15, 2005 @ 8:39 am

    I ran into the very same problem trying to bring in XPlanner into my team. It was a showstopper for me; I gave up before even trying to find the bug report. I really wish it Just Worked.

    I did find a guy that did a simple port of XPlanner to Ruby On Rails, but he hasn’t released the code and I haven’t asked for it yet. Seems like the kind of project that Rails would make simple - the main functionality is really just a way to view and edit a few DB tables.

  2. Jacques August 21, 2005 @ 3:10 pm

    0.7 is very close (within a month) and has this problem solved.
    You can build it right now from subversion. It is rather stable (we release it every 2 weeks internally). I am scheduled to put out a beta anytime now.

    BTW the guy you mentioned is Steve Bate, the original author pf xplanner. We looked at doing a rewrite in ROR and are still debating it. Obviously ROR has its speed of development. However we are also faced with catching up with all the investment in the current xplanner and the fact that Ruby does not have all the free components that java has. Rather good case of Innovator’s Dilemma ;-) http://docs.codehaus.org/display/XPR/Ruby+on+Rails+rewrite

  3. Ed Gibbs August 21, 2005 @ 9:32 pm

    Thanks for the info. I have a follow on post at Giving XPlanner Another Try.

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