In This Issue

• Mastering the Recession with Lean, Agile and Scrum - Peter StevensM
• The Decline and Fall of Agile - James Shore
• Prioritizing (the Backlog) For Profit - Hohmann: Article & Presentation
• VersionOne Winter '09 Release - V1 Propaganda Dept.
• Submit a Session Proposal for Agile 2009 - Deadline is Feb. 13

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Mastering the Recession with Lean, Agile and Scrum - Peter Stevens blog

Around the world, companies are challenged by the financial crisis. Companies face declining revenue and fixed costs. Lean, Agile and Scrum help your company at all levels to focus on doing the right things, like creating value for your customer and eliminating wasted cost and effort, to get you company back to profitability...

Read the blog post here.
(http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/peterstev/mastering-recession-lean-agile-and-scrum)

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The Decline and Fall of Agile - James Shore blog

This blog has been up for a little while (Nov. 14, 08) and has epic commentary (125 comments). Some of the comments are worth reading as much as the article - This one brought out some heavy hitters to post their thoughts.

"It's odd to talk about the decline and fall of the agile movement, especially now that it's so popular, but I actually think the agile movement has been in decline for several years now...."

Read the blog (and comments) here.
(http://jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Agile.html)

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Prioritizing (the Backlog) For Profit - Luke Hohmann: article and presentation

Having difficulty prioritizing the backlog? Luke Hohmann has described a method to make quantitative decisions about what backlog items should be considered first. In addition to the usual attributes such as implementation effort, Luke suggested adding attributes to measure the stakeholders needs, strategic alignment and to ask if the item is driving profit or not.

Read the article here.
(http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/Hohmann-prioritization-profit)

View the presentation here.
(http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/archived-webinars/prioritizing-your-backlog-for-profit/)

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VersionOne Winter '09 Release - V1 Propaganda Dept.

“Our focus with this release was to accelerate a team’s velocity by minimizing the steps involved with day-to-day tasks,” said Robert Holler, VersionOne CEO. “Team members and stakeholders now have even faster and easier ways to access to the information they need to manage and report on their projects.”

Learn more about Winter '09 here.
(http://www.versionone.com/Product/Whats_New.asp)

Sign up for a Winter '09 Release Webinar at the Community Site.
(http://community.versionone.com)

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Propose a Session for Agile 2009 in Chicago - Deadline is Feb 13, 2009

Do you have a story to tell about the implementation of Agile practices? Do you want to share your knowledge with the community? Propose a session for the Agile conference of the year. As an example, if you are a VersionOne customer, chances are you have the makings of a session for the Distributed Agile stage.

Agile 2009 is happening August 24-28th in Chicago, IL.

Find out how to propose a session or learn more here.
(http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/welcome)