Back to index cards

Over a range of projects that have been based around user stories, I have seen a number of different means of story management, including XPlanner, Mingle, spreadsheets, Pivotal Tracker and index cards. Each of these has good and bad points (some more than others), but I've come to regard index cards blue-tack'ed to the wall as the simplest and best option.

The major factor is visibility: regardless of what lanes you use, it is close to instant to view where each story is at and who is working on what. Compare this with logging onto your web-based story management tool (you remember your password/have enough licenses don't you?), selecting the right project, applying a few filters, removing the lanes you aren't interested in and hopefully getting a view of the current iteration.

Of course, you still might want to use a tool for history, backups or to share across team sites. I know of one rambunctious manager who likes to wander around project rooms silently removing random cards from stories walls, just to see what would happen!