Dropping XPlanner For Now

Today I stopped bothering to update XPlanner. Part of the Agile method is to “do the simplest thing that works.” XPlanner wasn’t really a simple install, but once I adjusted to the user interface it made at least logical sense. The problem is:

  • I already track my Scrum projects on white boards with sticky notes.
  • I already use 3×5 cards for user stories and tasks.
  • I do the time tracking, because time tracking really demotivates developers.
  • My developers are all collocated so they can see the white boards at the daily standups.
  • Tracking time takes way too many clicks. (I can see why they’re considering a nice friendly Ruby on Rails version with AJAX support)
  • The graphs only update once a day and really didn’t work that well for me.
  • Excel isn’t so bad.
  • It was just slowing me down and duplicating work I was already doing.

So I’ll toss a note to myself to check in on it maybe a year from now or look at a commercial option like Rally if I feel the need again, but for now I’m back to 3×5 cards, white boards and Excel.