A comparative evaluation of project management tools for extreme programming

Abstract

Extreme Programming, which is commonly termed as XP, is considered to be the most widely used “agile” software methodology among all that are available. As it is a kind of agile software development, XP promotes regular releases in brief development cycles and that is meant for improving efficiency plus introduction of checkpoints where the latest client necessities can be implemented. This research study evaluated the project management tools that are commonly used in the industry to support an XP development team. A selected set of these tools have been evaluated and their strengths and weaknesses are reported here. We also performed a gap analysis on all the tools that are available in the market. We determined the three best tools that are widely used and also to what extent these tools support the XP practices. One major conclusion from the research is that there is no single tool available that will help with all the various types of XP projects. The three tools that are most widely used cover most of the XP projects but still have some limitations in the areas of communications management, human resources management and risk management. As a result of this research our next steps will be doing more detailed evaluation of the PPTS tool with the goal of introducing the missing features. This is quite doable as PPTS is an open source tool. We also would like to do more research on the related development and testing tools that could be integrated with this tool to come up with a more functional IDE to fully support XP projects in both management and engineering practices.