Excel Instead of MS Project for Software Development Schedules
MS Project is not an effective tool for Software Development schedules. I can't speak for super-sized projects like a new national air-traffic control system, for example. But for projects with 2 to 10 developers, agile or otherwise, I've found Excel to be a better tool.
I've been at places where I have had to create Project Plans in Microsoft Project. In those cases I create a real task plan and schedule in Excel, then I load some portion of it into MS Project. Set a few dependencies, a little more clean up and we're good to go. "Project Plan?" "Check!" Of course, the "faux" plan never gets updated. This isn't a problem, because other than to see if it exists, no one ever looks at it for development efforts.
Another common situation is that someone else is maintaining a MS Project plan and I need to feed in a software development schedule. This is fine. I hand over some of the major build milestones, the date when we should be "code complete" and a few other dependencies and it all gets incorporated into the document. In many of these cases, the MS Project document might even be helpful. It may help to coordinate the efforts of different groups, including necessary training ("3 days to train the Sales Team on the new features"), creation of collateral materials ("T-shirts for all project participants to celebrate a successful launch"), scheduling of marketing campaigns ("Half page spread in the Wall Street Journal announcing the new capabilities"), and so on.
So, basically, I stick to Excel. It's simple and efficient. Joel Spolsky has a good piece on how to do development schedules with excel. I'll comment further on how my method correlates in an upcoming post.