Agile Project Management Tooling

 An interesting survey is published by Trail Ridge Consulting: http://trailridgeconsulting.com/surveys.html

Some of the key findings in this report include:

• Agile adoption still appears to be in an early adopters phase according to Geoffrey Moore’s definition in Crossing the Chasm
• Scrum is the most prevalent process in use today, but is often integrated with other agile practices and methods
• Larger companies only have a fraction of their development organization staff following agile processes and smaller ones are only just over half-penetrated
• Organizations use a range of tools to manage their agile process, even if they have purchased a dedicated agile project management tool
• Agile project management tools have overtaken manual approaches across all companies
• Smaller companies are just as likely (if not more so) to use agile project management tooling than large companies; though some of their reasons differ

Plus also this:

Enterprise-class APM tools from VersionOne and Rally Software are the tools of choice for almost 30% of development organizations (see Figure 16). These findings represent about half the companies using a tool. The next two most widely used tools are open source options, ScrumWorks and XPlanner, with 9% and 6% usage, respectively. The final quarter of responders are split among many other solution options from Microsoft, JIRA, ExtremePlanner, TargetProcess, Conchango ScrumVSTS and others.

Check out VersionOne’s survey also: http://www.versionone.net/surveyresults.asp

(Just one excerpt)

Which Agile methodology do you follow most closely?

1. Scrum           40%
2. eXtreme programming (XP)           23%
3. Hybrid / Custom           14%
4. DSDM          8%

In general these two companies Rally and VersionOne do great educational job on agile project management so I would recommend to go study white papers, surveys, and any other material on their web-sites. Decide what is important for your team and how agile can help. How disruptive of a transition you are willing to take.

But after that don’t forget to come back and try Yoxel SW,  the “new kid on the block” open-source solution for agile product management :). It may not have as elaborate interface at the moment but definitely has key features that allow very smooth non-disruptive transition to agile models of project/product management. Well, that is my biased opinion.