This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: The Simplest and Yet a Very Effective Feature Request tracking tool Feed Title: MemoRanda Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

One that works well for small, co-located teams is the index card for small features/stories.

Particularly nice if you are doing iterative development and you can put the index cards on the wall, partitioning the wall in designated areas: "this iteration's stories" (aka "front burner"), "next iterations stories" ("back burner"), other future stories ("refrigerator"), and not-to-be-done-this-release ("the freezer"). A project might have 100 to 200 stories (or more), but only a dozen or two are on the wall, in the 'active' state, at any time.

(Kitchen metaphor names courtesy of Net Objective's Alan Shalloway, see http://www.netobjectives.com/events/specific/pr_nca_2005_08_xbrfasd.htm Slides in pdf form here)

Bugs can be considered small features/stories as well, and tracked using index cards and the wall as well. Some teams use red index cards for bugs. If you have so many bugs that you need a database... you have too many bugs.

It's really nice to take a bug-report-on-paper, talk to the QA tester about the bug, take it to my computer, fix the bug (writing notes on that paper if I need to), and then take the paper to the QA tester and talk to him about the bug and its fix, leaving it for him to verify. It can then go back on the wall with a mark on it indicating that bug-fix is completed, or go back to me for additional work.

For remote employees, I've used a wiki to list stories, track who is working on them and when they're completed.