I agree about the multiple levels of planning and how cards can be more useful at one level than another. That’s what I was referring to when I spoke of using cards with online tools (possible for different aspects of the planning activity, as you described). I also have had the same experience with XPlanner or similar tools and the stakeholder appreciation for the status transparency without needing to be in the development room.

On the agile perspective…

I agree there is no official definition of the “agile perspective”. Perhaps I should have written “the opinions of recognized XP/Agile thought leaders”. I included quotes from a small sampling of those thought leaders so I don’t think it’s fair to say this is not a significant perspective within the XP/Agile communities. However, I agree the wording implies an possible over generalization to the agile community at large. I’ll be more careful in the future.

Thanks for keeping me accurate.

Steve

I don’t know about party lines, but I do know there’s more than one level of planning involved in a project. Note cards can be useful for very short term planning. For longer term planning - iteration, release, project, strategic - seems like note cards would be pretty cumbersome and error-prone.

On some projects, I’ve found customers like a tool like XPlanner because they can check on the status of their project at any time. If the team used note cards and literally nothing else, the customer would have to go to the work area in person to see the status of the project. Not very convenient in many cases.

>It’s not clear if the Agile perspective in this case is a lack of imagination or a lack of experience.

What you describe in this portion of your post hardly represents “the agile perspective.” Interesting that you mention strawman arguments in other contexts, indicating that you know what they are. And yet, this. Interesting. Maybe the strawman is in the eye of the beholder.