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figure 5. Ranked results from survey of former Berkeley students on whether course topics listed in the table and figure 3 were useful
in their industrial projects. these earlier versions of the course did not offer enhancing legacy code, design reviews, and working with
nontechnical customers.

75% 19%

13%

7%

7%

6%

7%

7%87%

93%

100%

Agree Neutral Disagree

Design patterns Working in a team

Version control

unit testing skills

(mocking, stubbing, test automation,…) saas knowledge (used in other languages/frameworks)

80%

Ruby on Rails

73%

20%

7%

cloud computing knowledge

67%

33%

test-first development

67%

20%

13%

user stories

60%

20%

20%

Lo-fi user interface mockups

44%

25%

31%

Velocity

21%

57%

21%

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

 

legacy code fits surprisingly well with the test-driven development of Agile.

To learn to communicate with nontechnical customers, for the Berkeley course we asked for projects from nonprofit organizations. The projects are typically less than 3,000 lines of code, with typically two to three times more code for testing than for the app. Teams of four or five students meet with customers on each Agile iteration for feedback on the current prototype and to prioritize the next features to add. (Moreover, we encourage students to connect these applications to Facebook or Twitter, which gives students the chance to deal with users as well as nontechnical customers within a single course.) Teams members do design reviews for each other as part of a biweekly class laboratory section, as Agile favors frequent code check-ins and design reviews. (Online students do not do projects.)

 

using the course
content afterward
Figure 4 shows the survey results of
Berkeley students from two earlier
course offerings. Just 22 of the 47 re-
spondents had graduated, and just 19
had done significant software projects.

The percentages indicate the results of their 26 software projects. We were surprised that Agile software development was so popular (68%) and that the cloud was such a popular platform (50%). Given that no language was used in more than 22% of the projects, our alumni must be using Agile in projects that use languages other than Ruby or Python. All the class teams had four or five students, which directly matches the average team size from the survey.

Once again, Agile development and Rails were not selected because we expected them to dominate students’ professional careers upon graduation; we use them to take advantage of their productivity so we can fit several critical ideas into a single college course in the hope they will use them later no matter what methodology, programming language, and framework.

Figure 5 shows the students’ ranking of the topics the table and Figure 3 in terms of usefulness in their industrial projects. Most students agreed that the top nine topics in the course were useful in their jobs. Once again, we were pleased to see that these ideas were still being used, even in industrial projects that did not rely on Agile or on Rails. The two lower ranked top-

ics were Lo-Fi User Interface Mockups, which makes sense since few developers work on the UI of a user-facing project, and Velocity, as progress can be measured in other ways in industry.

Although a small sample and not a conclusive user study, our survey offers at least anecdotal evidence that students of this course do continue to use successful software development techniques in later software projects of all kinds.

conclusion

Using Agile to develop SaaS apps via highly productive tools like Rails and deploying them using cloud computing cultivates good software practices and pleases many stakeholders:

˲ Students like it because they get the pride of accomplishment in shipping code that works and is used by people other than their instructors, plus they get experience that can help land internships or jobs.

˲Faculty like it because students actually use what they hear in lecture, even after graduation, and they experience how big CS ideas genuinely improve productivity. Virtual machines reduces hassles for faculty plus the cloud allows for more interesting program-