Tools, tools, tools

My kingdom for a horse! Agile is still early stage, so the tools are still maturing, along with our understanding of how to use them. I've now gone through the learning curve with three tools and here's what I have to say.

White Board
Sticky notes, white board, etc. - i.e. the classic XP way to manage a project. This was incredibly effective for the first two iterations. After this point it started to become a drag on productivity.
Reason 1: Our white board was too small. As stories unfolded there simply wasn't enough space to hold all the data and allow for a scratch space. We would need a dedicated room with two walls of white board - minimum 6' X 8', possibly 6' X 12' each. That would allow a rollup, priority list, and a scratch area to accomodate the story cards.
Reason 2: Historical data lives only in memory. There is little way to see where we were mid-sprint or track velocity.

Extreme Planner
Initially I found this tool to non-obvious, yet overly simplistic. I used it because the licensing terms allowed for long term use (albeit with only two users). It also lacks support for complext, multi-team projects. Over time, however, I have found this to be an excellent tool. It has an obvious interface one the project has begun. Drilldown and data entry is very straight-forward.

Version One
Large and lumbering, Version One boasts all the features an enterprise-class product could wish for - multiple team support, rich reporting, complex project dependancies. Problem is that it is damn near unusable. Rather than use drilldown navigation, every edit screen is a popup - and some don't even let you edit the data. Views that you would expect to guide you to task editing (iteration summary, home dashboard) lead to dead ends. The tiny tabular text is nigh unreadable. And it is currently a sealed product (no integrations) although they tell me an API is on the way. Please hire a graphic designer and an information architect.