I started playing with pivotaltracker.com today, which is a free, hosted storyboard tool. It’s free, but not open source, so you do not have the option of hosting it yourself, which means you’ll have to trust Pivotal Labs with your data. This includes: trusting that the service will remain up, trusting that the service will remain free, trusting that Pivotal won’t use your data to compete with you, etc. Some of these issues can be mitigated (e.g. by performing frequent exports of your data.)

Trust issues aside, so far, so good.

I’m testing it on a small project, one that should be completed after three 1-week iterations. I give it an A+ on ease-of-use, and it seems to have all the features that I’m going to need (and not much more that might get in the way). In a little over an hour, with no prior experience, I was able to watch the introductory video, create a project, invite other team members to join the project, load it up with a dozen stories with full descriptions and tags, organize the stories roughly under three release milestones, define the set of stories for the first iteration, and pull a backup of my data (CSV export). All of that worked exactly as expected without any hiccups.

I’ll keep you posted.