Agile Planning Tools

A few notes on this list:

I tried to collect just the tools that are written specifically for the purpose of Agile planning. I know that a lot of teams use 3×5 cards and/or Excel for tracking and managing their projects. However, although you can use Excel to manage your planning process, Excel was not created with Agile planning in mind. So Excel doesn’t belong on this list. There are plenty of planning products that make the claim of being compatible with Agile planning. For instance, Microsoft Project has a Scrum plug-in. But MS Project was never really intended to support Agile planning. And if I may be so bold, the support it does provide sucks. So I have left out products that are basically Gant charting tools that some might consider using for planning Agile projects.

This list is by no means comprehensive. If you are aware of additional products that I have missed, please let me know. So here they are in no particular order:

  1. Rally
  2. Scrumworks
  3. XPlanner
  4. Mingle
  5. VersionOne
  6. TargetProcess
  7. xProcess
  8. Extreme Planner
  9. ProjectCards
  10. CardMeeting
  11. XP Story Studio
  12. PlanningPoker
  13. Acunote
  14. SilverCatalyst
  15. PlanB

I learned a few things researching this list. First, everybody and their cat has a planning tool these days. It was only a few years ago that there were only a handful of products available if you were interested in a tool for planning Agile projects. Now they are a dime a dozen. It’s starting to look like a pretty competitive market. There still seems to be a healthy mix of open source and commercial applications, so alternatives are available to fit whatever budget you have (or don’t have).

I’ve provided some minimal information with each product so that you can investigate them yourself. For those of you who want the “Cliff’s Notes” summary, over the next few weeks my plan is to write reviews for these products. Some of them are products that I have used before quite extensively, others I will install and try out.

Stay tuned.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Agile Planning Tools”

  1. Dan Greening Says:
    January 25, 2008 at 5:37 pm | Reply

    There is also Greenhopper, which is a JIRA plugin providing sticky-note board capabilities and burn down charts. See http://www.greenhopper.com/en

  2. Dusan Kocurek Says:
    April 25, 2008 at 11:58 am | Reply

    A new tool is a ScrumDesk. See http://www.scrumdesk.com.
    It is .NET 3 based desktop application with full drag and drop based UI displaying story index cards on freely zoomable board. ScrumDesk integrates reports and SCRUM metrics, multiteam support, IP phone, email, bug tracking and project documentation systems integration.

  3. Agile Planning Tools Revisited « Agile Tools Says:
    May 28, 2008 at 11:26 pm | Reply

    [...] my last post listing Agile planning tools a few more have come to my attention [...]

  4. Jarno Vähäniitty Says:
    October 3, 2008 at 11:10 pm | Reply

    Agilefant is an open source (MIT license) software tool for managing software development projects and related activities. It strives to bring together the perspectives of organizing daily work, long-term product and release planning and project portfolio management. Check out more at the home page http://www.agilefant.org

  5. Scrum Mff: Existing tools review Says:
    November 8, 2008 at 3:12 pm | Reply

    [...] the following list of tools for managing agile projects we picked up these tools to [...]

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