Overview

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..