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TargetProcess:Planning 1.0.1, Free
TargetProcess
http://www.targetprocess.com
TargetProcess:Planning is a free, ASP.NET-based tool to help with agile project management. It's not tied to any particular agile methodology, but seems more or less inspired by XP and Scrum. It takes a fairly basic approach to the task at hand, perhaps inspired by the agile notion of doing the simplest thing that can possibly work. In this case, that means defining teams made up of users, and any number of projects. Projects have releases, releases have iterations. You break functionality up into user stories. User stories are assigned to users and iterations. The software helps you track how much work you've assigned to the current iteration, monitors the velocity of work, and helps you keep an eye on whether you're proceeding at the pace that you promised when you picked stories for the current iteration.
Installation was trivially simple: download an unzip the software, create the SQL Server database and run two scripts to set it up, set the connection string in the web.config file, and off I went. There's a manual that will walk you through how the whole thing works in ten minutes. Now, you won't know all about XP by the time you read this, nor will this tool do all the management an agile project needs. But it will take care of some of the necessary tracking for you. I can see how it could fit in with some of the other practices like standup meetings and pair programming quite well.
TargetProcess hopes that you'll be sufficiently intrigued by their free tool to investigate the commercial version, TargetProcess:Suite. This version integrates bug tracking and timesheets, among other features. You can testdrive the Suite demo on the TargetProcess Web site to get a feel for how these features are baked in to the whole. If you decide you like the results, it'll cost you $799 to buy your own copy. Or for $2,499 you can buy TargetProcess:Enterprise, which comes with full source code and 20 hours of custom development time.
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.