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ExtremePlanner 2.0, $495/5 users
ExtremePlanner Software
http://www.extremeplanner.com/index.html
ExtremePlanner is a Java-based Web interface for agile project management. If your whole team is in one room, most agile methodologies would have you using story cards to plan things - index cards with bits of functionality written on them and tacked on the wall. But what if the project team is spread around the building or around the world? In that case, you can't really do most traditional agile methodologies, but software like this can get you closer by giving you a lightweight shared management tool for the work to be done.
ExtremePlanner gives you a tabbed interface to track the essentials for an agile project: a summary, metrics, stories, tasks (finer-grained bits of stories), test cases (the customer-facing bits that let you know when a story is done), releases, and iterations (the chunks of time that you plan in). Within each tab, you get lists of things, and you click on items in the list to view their details. The details are fixed, and you can't change the schema. So, for example, a task is characterized by its story, name, description, type, the developer it's assigned to, estimated and completed hours, and current status. Everything is hyperlinked, so, for example, you can jump from a task to the containing story easily.
Metrics provided include a burndown chart (which shows how well you're eliminating the pile of undone work) and an estimate accuracy chart to show hoe well your estimates match reality on completed tasks. You can also export data to Excel for further crunching.
Overall, ExtremePlanner does what it says it does, without a lot of extra bells and whistles. You can try it out online, and a two-user version is free for downloading. Prices after that go up according to the number of named users you need.
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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.
Published January 16, 2006