Trail Ridge Consulting has released the results of an agile project management tooling survey performed in late 2006. Apparently, APM tools are being widely used by both small and large organizations although the primary reasons differ with the size of the organization. It was interesting to me to see that card-based approaches are used less often than dedicated APM tools or MS Office tools like Excel.
It was also interesting to see that XP has been adopted in about half as many organizations as Scrum. Of course, I’d guess that many of the Scrum shops are using at least some XP software development practices.
XPlanner was the fourth most widely used APM tool and the only open source product in the top 10 most used tools. (There is a factual error in the survey results that says ScrumWorks is also open source. The ScrumWorks Basic product is free but not open source). XPlanner is also the most used tool focusing specifically on XP. It surprised me a little to see that XPlanner is adopted somewhat more by large organizations than small organizations. It’s possible that this is an indication that the licensing fees for the commercial tools are high enough to cause some pain for large organizations. I know at least one large organization that chose XPlanner over VersionOne for this reason.
As the founder of the XPlanner project, I’m very happy to see it so widely used even with no marketing or sales resources.