The Google talk was given by Petra Cross, who worked on the gmail team, and loves dogs. The most strikng information for me was about the code reviews. A piece of code has to go through two reviews before being accepted into the main application stream. It reminded me of a quicky given by the Stockholm JUG leader, Mattias Karlsson, who explained that his team was doing code reviews once a week during a one hour meeting. Each developper has to show his code to the other team members, taking in their constructive remarks. Code quality can really take many faces.
The Murex talk was more about a company striving to grow while improving its code quality and release precison, introducing more and more Java along the way into a code that was originally 100% C++.