XPlanner is a project planning and tracking tool for eXtreme Programming (XP) teams. If you are not familiar with XP software development practices, the links page contains pointers to relevant resources. To summarize the XP planning process, the customers pick the features to be added (user stories) to each development iteration (typically, one to three weeks in duration). The developers estimate the effort to complete the stories either at the story level or by decomposing the story into tasks and estimating those. Information about team development velocity from the previous iteration is used to estimate if the team can complete the stories proposed by the customer. If the team appears to be overcommitted, the set of stories are renegotiated with the customer. The XPlanner tool was created to support this process and address issues experienced in a long-term real-life XP project.
This is very much a work in progress. We expect this tool to evolve as our and the software community's understanding of XP and other agile processes increases. If you'd like to the discuss the planning approaches supported by this tool or provide other feedback and suggestions there is a mailing list for that purpose or contribute to our wiki.
Features
Simple planning model
Virtual note cards
Support for recording and tracking projects, iterations, user stories, and tasks.
Smart continuation of unfinished stories (unfinished tasks copied, copied stories are crosslinked).
Distributed integration token (with email notification)
Online time tracking and time sheet generation at individual/team level
Metrics generation (team velocity, individual hours, ...)
Charts for iteration velocity, Scrum burn down, distribution of task types, dispositions, and more..
Ability to attach notes to stories and tasks (with attachments).
Iteration estimate accuracy view
Page showing task and story status for individual developers and customers.
Export of project and iteration information to XML, MPX (MS Project), PDF, and iCal formats.
TWiki-style text formatting support with support external tool integration and extensible wiki word linking.
Integrated, extensible authentication supports multiple projects with project-specific authorization.
SOAP interfaces for advanced XPlanner integration and extension.
Language support for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Russian, Chinese,
and Japanese..
XPlanner Tips
Use a pseudo-iteration to store unplanned stories
XPlanner doesn't currently have direct support for an unplanned story container. However, most teams create a pseudo-iteration called something like "backlog" or "unplanned stories" with a start date far into the future. Unplanned stories are placed in this container and then moved to an iteration during the planning game.
Use Edit links in aggregate pages
In pages showing tables of objects, use the edit link on each row to edit objects rather than selecting the name link, editing the object and then navigating back to the aggregrate page. This will save many mouse clicks.
Use XSLT to convert XML export data to other formats
You can use an XSLT transform to convert the XML export to formats such as RTF (MS Word), Postscript, or static XHTML pages.
XPLANNER