maibornwolff / retro

A self-hostable web application designed for remote retrospectives

Retro - Reflect, Refine, Repeat

What is Retro?

Retro is a tool that is used for retrospectives and planning poker sessions. The goal of Retro is to have an easy to use and secure way of having retro and planning poker sessions.

Retro uses a peer-to-peer approach, where all communication including retro and poker information is shared between users only and never reaches a backend server. The backend server is only used for signaling, which is the initial handshake between the participants in a room. This is possible by following the WebRTC protocol.

Retrospective

Planning Poker

Requirements

• Latest Node.js LTS version
• NPM version >= 7

Hosting

This application requires three services to be running and configured correctly.

Docker image	Exposed port
Retro Frontend	80
Retro Backend	3001
Signaling Server	9000

WebRTC

By default, the clients identify the IP address of the other peers by using a public STUN server by Google. A TURN server is not provided by default and must be hosted additionally. The frontend can be configured to overwrite the ice server urls.

Environment variables example

Frontend

• RETRO_MAX_VOTE_COUNT = 3
• BACKEND_PROTOCOL = "https"
• BACKEND_HOST = "my-api-domain.com"
• BACKEND_PORT = 443
• SIGNALING_SERVER_PROTOCOL = "https"
• SIGNALING_SERVER_HOST = "my-signaling-domain.com"
• SIGNALING_SERVER_PORT = 443
• ICE_SERVER_URLS = "stun://stun.l.google.com:19302,turn://user:[email protected]:1914"

Backend

• CORS_ORIGIN = "my-api-domain.com,my-signaling-domain.com"

Development

Quick start guide can be found here

Contributing

For information on how to contribute, see Contributing

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Adrian Endrich 💻	Ben Willenbring 💻 🤔 🚧 📆	Claas Busemann 💻	Dominik Schumann 💻	Lukas Richter 💻 🤔 🚧 📆	Maria Hallmann 💻 ⚠️	Marius Wichtner 💻
Martin Schröder 💻	PaulaBre 💻	Tobias 💻	Yadullah Duman 💻 👀 🤔	ravensinth 💻	Manuel Lehé 💻

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

retro's Issues

Add a toggle in order to prevent board deletion by cronjob

There are use cases, where people don't want their board to be deleted. In order to prevent deletion from the cronjob, we need to add some sort of toggle. which tells us to not delete this board.

Own cards shouldn't be blurry

Currently, we are blurring all cards. We need a way to just blur the cards that are not owned by the participant

Comment on cards

The use case would be something like this:

Sometimes when we discuss about an item and there could be some relevant information about it (e.g. a link), then people started to share this information via the chat of the video client. With this feature all relevant information or just some comment could be attached on that retro item itself.

i18n

Timeboxing

Increase the amount of text allowed inside a card

Currently the maximum amount of characters allowed for the card content is 10000. Some people requested to increase the size, since they write sometimes more text than usual.

How to handle vote points when cards are merged

In retrospectives, you actually do the clustering before voting. So this might be not a real issue. To get 100% sure about it, it wouldn't hurt to investigate a bit about this.

Take a look at constate

https://github.com/diegohaz/constate

reduces boilerplate

Different colors for problem space and solution space and extra Action Item cards

Columns can have different colors in order to distinguish problem- and solution space. Furthormore provide a special card that resembles an Action Item

Vote count can be set to negative numbers

Vote count can be set to negative numbers .
Should go max. down to 0 Votes.

(Or is there a use case I am not aware of, that requires negative votes?
Downvoting could be restricted, aka "Max. 3 downvotes", but that seems to me like a new feature and mostly not needed in typical retrospective circumstances)

Sort is buggy, overriding cards

When dragging a column, the column expands into full height

When you drag a column, it expands into the full page height instead of its original height. Violates POLA in my opinion.

Prefill board with well-known retro formats

There are some common retrospective formats. Instead of creating these formats manually, the user can automatically generate it automatically

Delete Cards

Move styled components to separate file

These are the files, using styled components

Board.js

• Container -> rename to BoardContainer

Column.js

• Container -> rename to ColumnContainer
• StyledTitle (has component as argument) -> rename to ColumnTitle
• ItemsContainer
• ColumnHeader
• ButtonContainer
• ColumnActionButton (has component as argument)

Header.js

• Container -> rename to HeaderContainer
• StyledTitle (has component as argument) -> rename to BoardTitle

Item.js

• Container -> rename to ItemContainer

Clicking "thumbs-up" button increments card points

Add a page for planning poker

In the Homepage you will have an option to start a planning poker session. After clicking it you start a new sprint planning context at /planning/:id.

The planning procedure will be very basic.

All users see a list of cards they can choose for each story to vote. When the moderator starts the poll. Everyone has one vote. The moderator can start a re-vote.

Signal Everyone/Beacon for attention

Add some functionality for the moderator to raise attention

Change to CircleCI

Since TravisCI did some shady moves lately, I'd personally feel more comfortable by using CircleCI.

Cluster Cards

Introduce DB

The project currently works with the filesystem. To ensure performance and relief the server from too many filesystem accesses, we need to introduce a database. That means that we have to change the whole backend API from the fs module of Node.js to an appropriate DB API

Continue discussion alert

If we reach the time limit of a discussion, we pop up a dialog where every user can either vote for or against a continued discussion.

Private Mode

The moderator can activate the private mode in order to blur items in the writing phase

Vote Count

The moderator can specify the amount of votes each user has.

Board Export

Users have the ability to export their board as PDF when their retrospective is finished

Clustering of Board Items

Users have the ability to cluster items on the board, that may have similar content

Cards change their width when pressing the like button

Reproduction:

• create a column with two items in it
• like one item and then try to like to other one ==> width of the other one shrinks

Mobile testing

We need some manual testing in order to see what works and what's not

Create a filter in order to filter authors

Some teams apparently have the following workflow:

• Everyone creates their cards
• Then each user introduces all its cards

A filter would make this process easier, since you don't need search for it the hard the way

Make use of useCallback

https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-reference.html#usecallback

https://blog.hackages.io/react-hooks-usecallback-and-usememo-8d5bb2b67231

Sort cards by votes

UI/UX improvements for dialogs

All dialogs display an error state by default, when e.g. a textfield is empty at first. From a UX perspective is this not a good practice. We should highlight nothing at first and after an interaction with the form field, we highlight the error message in the error case.

Cards are editable

Import/Export Board

A feature request, where the moderator can export the board metadata and can create a new board based on this metadata. The provided use-case was that e.g. person A is creating a board template and provides this template for person B. So both work with the same initial state, but can modify it how they want in their teams.

Timeboxing

Users can define in their settings a timebox for each item that will be discussed.

Joining the board

If I get a link to a board and join it, I want to see the current board

Create boards from known retrospective ideas

More E2E tests

We definitely need more tests, since some are missing and we also have new features again, that are untested.

Add virtual list support from rbd

react-beautiful-dnd provided since v12 a virtual list support. This feature might be really handy

Ability to export the board

Facebook-like reactions for cards

Add reactions like known in Facebook for cards

i18n

Provide the ability to blur columns separately

A feature request, where the moderator has the ability blur and unblur columns separately

Testing

We definitely need to add tests before release and setup a CI server

Information that someone is currently writing something

Like you see it in every chat app. As long as someone is writing something or has a "create card" modal open, we display something like Participants are writing ...

Privacy Mode

• If the privacy mode is on, then all cards are blurry at creation
• If the privacy mode is off, then all cards are not blurry

Add keybindings

Introduce useful keybindings to enable a smooth workflow. E.g. for item creation, deletion etc.

Set a maximum vote count

Add timeboxing

You can trigger timeboxing by a mechanism (e.g. button) in order to start a timer, which runs as long as the user defined.

Use the Context API of React

https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html