Learner Reviews & Feedback for Software Development Processes and Methodologies by University of Minnesota

The course material is not detailed at all. The Lecturers have bad grammar and make many mistakes. Some of the material asked on quizzes is not in the lecture in the first part of the course.

However, the worst part of this course is the Peer Reviewed Assignment system. This relies on the intelligence and capability of random strangers who can sometimes lack basic understanding of the course material themselves as well as English comprehension skills. This in turn can affect your course grade which is just absolutely absurd.

A very lazily designed course by the University of Minnesota. They should be ashamed for putting out something like this.

The course is well structured and the quiz level is proportionate to the level of detail provided in the lecture.

However the peer-graded assignments are "dangerous" and can make you waste weeks, precluding the possibility of proceeding with the course. It's happened to me to receive unjustified poor grade from the same peer more than once, giving a low score to points that were fully covered in my submission. Moreover the peer didn't provide any explanation to support the poor score. Without any control from the course moderator some peers can prevent you from passing an assignment wasting entire weeks. Think about it before paying for this course.

I'm sorry to give a low rating to the course that is not bad at all, but the lack of supervision from the moderator is a huge handicap.

Great beginner course for those interested in software development processes and methodologies. Very applicable especially if you're a software engineer or an aspiring IT project manager.

I completed the first three courses seven months ago and the fourth course has yet to be offered. I selected these courses because they were offered as part of a specialization. Selling the course as a specialization but never offering the last course is not only very frustrating but false advertising. I would not have paid and taken these courses if I had known that the last course was not going to be offered, and therefore, I could not complete the specialization that was advertised.

By what I could understand, the fourth course of the specialization will "never" be published (people have been complaining about it not being available since 2018). Moreover, one of the teachers has a really strong accent, which is honestly distracting. Some material is alright, but most isn't, and having to deal with the aforementioned issues makes this course pointless at best, useless at worst.

Updated review.

Initially I have provided a 4-stars score for the course and the initial review is below.

At the same time I want to make sure this review can be viewed by the people who aim to get the certificate for THE WHOLE SPECIALIZATION, therefore I give a bad score to attract attention of those learners.

If you plan to finish the whole specialization, please be informed that the 4th course from the specialization is missing FOR M.ORE THAN 2 YEARS ALREADY! so most probably you will not be able to complete it in order to have the certificate.

Please take into consideration this information if it might influence your decision whether you want to subscribe to the whole specialization or not.

Kind regards.

Initial review:

Overall a good course for beginners.

Some of the things I didn't like were:

1) The peer review doesn't come on time and you have to wait until someone will review your project, otherwise the course is not considered as complete and you cannot move on to get your certificate.

2) In the first 3 weeks of the course there are some questions in Quizzes that are related to Agile methodology, which is explained actually in the 4th week, which creates confusions.

I am very disappointed by this course. The slides are not available and it seems that no one cares about it. A couple of month ago someone asked for the slides in the forums, but the answer was dismissive and hasn't been updated yet.

The quizzes and projects seem to have not been quality checked, the question phrasing is bad and the answers sometimes don't seem to correspond well with the material taught in the video lectures.

This course was a good overview of various development models. I've been leading a small Software Development Team at a small company and don't have a back ground in Software Development. This course was easy to understand and added value to my professional development.

The week 4 content was very interesting and the whole course was executed excellently and the content was good enough to justify the course title.

Excellent way to dig deeper into Agile frameworks. Instructors were knowledgeable and gave good assignments. Thank you.

This course is great, the instructors teach us a lot of valuable material. Thank you!

This course is well designed.

There were a lot of issues like typos in the presentations, more than once there were some moments in the videos that were supposed to be cut out (for instance the lecturer misspoke, went silent and started over or the phone went off very loudly while he was still talking), the lecturer has a very strong accent, which is okay, but the subtitles weren't always of great helps since sometimes they just had the word {inaudible}. This was a huge disappointment to be honest.

Oh, and if you are taking this course as a part of specialization, good luck getting a certificate, since the final course never becomes available.

Information is not sufficient

The course was well put together by great tutors. The elements of the course were very useful and I personally found the graded quizzes to be of most value. Another interesting part was the peer-graded assignment which made me stretch my brain. There are various elements in this course that helped me not only go through the videos and quizzes but also to solidify my learning elements.The overall experience was awesome. Thank you University of Minnesota for this.

I liked the videos and quizzes however i did not like the peer review projects. One of the speakers was a little hard to follow and understand. I will be looking for courses elsewhere.

Poorly produced and difficult to follow.

worst course....

It was very productive, and good experience, support is very helpful, no need to worry about any problem which you might face during process, connected to assignments mostly, cause it might be an issue when it comes to fair grading. So in overall I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in this field, and I continue to complete all the courses I find interesting. Good job, Coursera!

As an R&D manager that is becoming more involved in software development, this course by Praveen Mittal and Kevin Wendt was a great introduction to SW development processes and methodologies. The content was immediately useful in my current role. The structure of the course with videos, quizzes, mini-projects, and peer-review grading was well designed and effective for learning the material.

Excelente curso dinámico, con quiz continuamente para validar aprendizaje, 2 tareas bastante completas, requiere un análisis completo con lo aprendido.

Los profesores muy claros para impartir el curso.

Excellent course, with a lot of quizzes to validate learning, great 2 assignments peer reviewed, they wasn't easy, requires a complete analysis with what has been learned.

I started this course as a complete beginner on this topic but the instructors give really good explanatios about the methodologies, with examples and the final projects of week 3 and four really helps you to apply the acquired knowledge. Very recommendable. Greetings from Mexico.

I like the professionalism of the course, It is like if you were taking a real university course. I could notice the difference because I have tried other platforms and I didn't like their methodology. The content of the course gave me the big picture of Software Development.

Excellent refresher on traditional methods and good introduction with new methods. Course had a nice balance of content, quizzes, and assignments. Having to grade your peers on the same assignments was a nice way to further solidify understanding of the materials.

It provides very practical approach to Software Development processes, workable methodologies and practices, very helpful to new Engineers and I do recommend it for all Process Improvement Professionals who are involved in Software Development Process.