In what could have been the the most important keynote at a Quality Conference this year, Kent Beck delivered his Software G Forces talk at STP Con last month. To me, the most impactful idea of the year is Continuous Delivery and this talk is about not just the technical problems you encounter, but the organizational and business ones that companies have to tackle in order to do it. I’ve since suggested to more than a few people that they should print out the deck, tape it on the wall and use it as a checklist.

**[Software G Forces](http://www.slideshare.net/KentBeck/software-g-forces "Software G Forces")**</param></param></param></embed>
View more [presentations](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [KentBeck](http://www.slideshare.net/KentBeck).

A lot of my notes were taken straight from the slides so are wonderfully redundant since the deck is embeddable. But there are a couple things that I don’t think are there.

  • Inspiration is preparation plus panic
  • The trick is to identify the visionary crazy people from the crazy crazy people
  • Automated acceptance tests – when you have 3 months to deploy you don’t have 2 months to test
  • Subscriptions – when you release all the time, customers don’t want/expect to be billed each release and it also decouples the billing cycle from the development one
  • Getting rid of the QA department does not mean getting rid of the testers — just the organizational split
  • Even with complete automation as a goal, things that need human judgement still require humans
  • Rollbacks are triggered by business metrics not technical metrics
  • If death is the alternative, then radical change is appropriate. Otherwise, test the water