Any recommendation to manage an investigation projects?

Question

I'm working on an investigation on the NLP field. Since software engineering and software documentation are not the primary concerns of my whole investigation I decided to do it using XP.

My question is, can you recomend:

• Any tool you've used to manage XP projects
• Any recomendation/link on how to manage investigation projects

I'm very biased with XP because I've used it before, but if anyone has a better methodology you can post it as well