If you had to say to your Team that fewer than 8 out of 100 people know the difference between a search engine and a browser, would they believe you? Would it make a difference to how you built software? You know, those geeky bits that express technical prowess, but user ignorance?

“How do you get your boss to approve something, the customer service people to understand the pain a system is causing, or the folks in engineering to see things your way?” asks Seth Godin in a recent blog.

“Powerpoint was invented for this precise function, and we all know what’s become of that. Here’s a new way that’s extraordinarily effective: Make a video. Take a Flip or cheap video camera and interview your customers. Ask them questions and show the answers to your Team.”

Ji Lee at Google masterminded this man-on-the-street interview, asking over 50 passersby of different ages and backgrounds in the Times Square in New York, “What is a browser?” Watch the many responses people came up with.

“Invest an hour,” Godin suggests, “and suddenly, it’s not you who’s talking, asking, complaining or being ignorant. It’s your customers.”

Go on, give it a try.

Have you ever wondered whether that guy upstairs is Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert? I certainly have. He seems to have the inside track on the same insane bureaucracy that we have to deal with every day. Like this:

Slide review: 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr, by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond.

Communications and cooperation between development and operations isn’t optional, it’s mandatory. Flickr takes the idea of ‘release early, release often’ to an extreme: On a normal day there are 10 full deployments of the site to their servers. This session discusses why this rate of change works so well, and the culture and technology at Flickr needed to make it possible.

Slides by: Flickr, for Velocity 2009 | Language: English | Slides: 78 | Produced by: Flickr | Presenter/s: John Allspaw and Paul Hammond.

Video review: Scrum Tuning: Lessons Learned from Google, by Jeff Sutherland.

Adwords introduced a Scrum implementation at Google in small steps with remarkable success. As presented at the Agile 2006 conference this exemplifies a great way to start up Scrum teams.

Jeff Sutherland, the inventor and co-creator of Scrum uses this approach in building the Google Scrum implementation to describe some of the subtle aspects of Scrum along with suggested next steps that can help in distributing and scaling Scrum in a ‘Googley way’.

Video by: Google Tech Talks | Language: English | Running time: 1:00:07 | Produced by: Google, Inc. October 8, 2007 | Speaker/s: Jeff Sutherland

Video review: Scrum in Under 10 Minutes, by Hamid Shojaee.

This is a high paced introduction to the basic concepts that make Scrum great, according to Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee. You’ll hear about Scrum terms like burn-down charts, team roles, product backlogs, sprints, daily scrums and more. Managing agile teams will become a little easier when you understand some of the Scrum jargon.

Video by: Axosoft | Language: English | Running time: 7:59 | Produced by: Shojaee, H; Harju, D; Coppola, A | Speaker/s: Hamid Shojaee

Video review: Scrum et al, by Ken Schwaber

Scrum is an amazingly simple process that causes many changes in an organisation when it is implemented. And because it really is simple common sense, many people try to add complexity to it. So it’s beneficial to hear again the idea from first principles.

This seminar by Ken Schwaber, co-founder of the agile process called Scrum, presents the basic framework of Scrum and some of the implementation issues associated with it. Ken is a founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, and is a signatory to the Agile Manifesto. He has been a software developer for over thirty years. He is an active advocate and evangelist for Agile processes.

Video by: Google Tech Talks | Language: English | Running time: 1:01:14 | Produced by: Google, Inc. 5 September 2006| Speaker/s: Ken Schwaber