We’ve worked on a few projects over the years where we’ve adopted agile project planning practices. As a result, we’ve used a few of the tools that are out there, such as Rally, and just haven’t been that impressed (not to mention the cost!). It seems to me that the beauty of Agile is that its simple, and I feel like the tools that go along with it should be too. I’m a big fan of 7 Signal’s Basecamp, and use it a lot. Its good for what it is, but its not a project planing tool (which is fair, as its not supposed to be).

When we run agile, most of the actual day-to-day planning activity focuses around a white board, with basically a bunch of post-it notes that we physically move around. So, why is it that none of these project planning tools for Agile seem to be as simple? In my experience, they seemed to get bogged down by trying to give us too many features.

So, at Ad Astra we developed our own tool, trying to keep it as simple as possible. And, finally, we’ve decided to release it into the wild as a free service with the hope that other people will find it useful. We’re going to open source the code, if we have any interest from the community to do so. So, if you’re interested, send us an email and we’ll get you hooked up with the code repo. Its Beta software, and a work in progress – when we have free time!

Check it out at etasking.com.