Scrum
Another great Google Tech Talk by Ken Schwaber, September 5, 2006, that can be viewed here: Scrum et al.
Scrum is an agile method for project management. Pivotal in its conception was Ken Schwaber, who used an approach that led to scrum at his company in the early 1990’s. He’s also a very good lecturer that really captures the audience with lots of humorous anecdotes, so this presentation is well worth watching for anyone remotely interested in software development and project management.
First of he starts with presenting a lot of the problems that ails a lot of software development projects, most (all) of which I sadly recognized. He then proceeds to introduce scrum and explains how it can solve (some of) the problems. As he says, scrum can be used by total morons, who can’t stand each other, can’t program, don’t know the domain at hand, etc., and they will consistently turn out crap at the end of each month (a sprint in scrum terminology) 
And that’s good! Transparency is the name of the game after all. Another mantra is not to let go of quality. Often management will get pressured, and all to readily sacrifice quality. And crap accumulates. One of the key points in scrum is that something is not released until it’s done, i.e. fully specified, documented, programmed, QA’ed, has appropriate unit tests, etc. The way he emphasizes the word done made me wonder if I ever had heard the word before - and in the sense he meant it, I knew I hadn’t…
A wonderful presentation. Watch and learn.
Rating: 8 / 10.