2007-09-26

Agile Project Management Tools

Recently, I've been tasked to research different Agile Project Management tools. Currently, my team is using XPlanner (http://xplanner.org/)and we're quickly growing out of it. Since it is open source, it was the easiest to incorporate into our environment without significant overhead of payments, legal, etc.

What I'm looking for is a web based application to do agile project management and tracking. The applications I've looked at so far are:
I'm leaning towards VersionOne. It's rather expensive (not the most expensive however), but it has a lot of features that we're looking for such as reporting on daily updates, monitoring task re-estimates, and easy drag-and-drop planning.

The most important aspect is the drag-and-drop planning. XPlanner doesn't have this type of feature...Actually, it doesn't even have the concept of a backlog or work queue. You have to create a meta-iteration to put user stories there that are not scheduled for development. To pull user stories into an iteration from this "work queue" in XPlanner, you must click on the "move/continue" button on a per user story basis. It gets very time intensive and a waste when in a planning meeting. You don't want to waste everyones time in the planning meeting to go through these wizard screens.

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