About this course: To deliver agile outcomes, you have to do more than implement an agile process; you have to create a culture of experimentation. It's this commitment to experimenting that's at the heart of a high-functioning practice of agile. This course shows you how to integrate the practice of experimentation across concept/feature testing, usability testing, and testing the software itself. Basically, you’ll learn how to answer these four big questions with experiments: 1. Should we build it? 2. Did it matter? 3. Is it usable? 4. Did it break? More specifically, after completing this course, you’ll be able to: - Identify where and how to invest your team’s scarce time and energy into better testing for maximum impact on outcomes - Coach your team on the relationship between idea, usability, and software testing to get the buy-in you need for strong interdisciplinary collaboration - Test ideas before you build them to avoid waste and help your team focus on what will really drive outcomes - Test alternative interface patterns before you build them to maximize both product usability and purposeful implementation - Understand your delivery pipeline and how to prioritize process and infrastructure improvements so you can deliver faster and more often As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 20 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122) This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.
Who is this class for: This course is aimed at professionals working in software and IT or interested in moving into this space.
Created by: University of Virginia
Taught by: Alex Cowan, Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business
| Basic Info | Course 4 of 5 in the Agile Development Specialization |
| Commitment | 3 weeks of study, 2-4 hours/week |
| Language | English |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
| User Ratings |
Syllabus
WEEK 1
Should we build it? Did it matter?
Nothing will help a team deliver better outcomes like making sure they’re building something the user values. This might sound simple or obvious, but I think after this module it’s likely you’ll find opportunities to help improve your team’s focus by testing ideas more definitively before you invest in developing software. In this module you’ll learn how to make concept testing an integral part of your culture of experimentation. We’ll continue to apply the Lean Startup methods you learned in Course 2 ‘Running Product Design Sprints’ (and/or you can review the tutorials in the Resources section). We’ll look at how high-functioning teams design and run situation-appropriate experiments to test ideas, and how that works before the fact (when you’re testing an idea) and after the fact (when you’re testing the value of software you’ve released).
25 videos, 1 reading
- Reading: Course Overview & Requirements
- Video: Meet the Companies - HVAC in a Hurry and Enable Quiz
- Video: The Test Driven Practice of Agile Part 1
- Video: The Test Driven Practice of Agile Part 2
- Video: The Test Driven Practice of Agile Part 3
- Video: Test-Driven Proposition Design
- Video: Recap on Lean Startup & Experimentation
- Video: Tracking Hypotheses
- Video: Tristan Kromer on the Practice of Lean Startup
- Video: Tristan Kromer on Getting Started with Lean
- Video: Tristan Kromer on Creating a Culture of Experimentation
- Video: David Bland on the Practice of Lean Startup
- Video: David Bland on Creating a Culture of Experimentation, Part 1
- Video: David Bland on Creating a Culture of Experimentation, Part 2
- Video: David Bland on Marrying Agile to Lean Startup
- Video: Laura Klein on Creating a Culture of Experimentation
- Discussion Prompt: Learnings from David, Tristan, and Laura
- Video: Five Core Experiments
- Video: Designing Experiments
- Video: Laura Klein on the Practice of Lean UX
- Video: Testing Features: When and How
- Video: Testing Features: Running the Experiment
- Video: Testing Funnels
- Video: Testing Cohorts
- Video: A/B Testing
- Video: Advanced Outcome Management: The Hook Framework
Graded: Week 1 Quiz: Should we build it? Did it matter?
WEEK 2
Is it usable?
The best products are tested for usability early and often, avoiding the destructive stress and uncertainty of a ‘big unveil’. In this module, you’ll learn how to diagnose, design and execute phase-appropriate user testing. The tools you’ll learn to use here (a test plan template, prototyping tool, and test session infrastructure) are accessible/teachable to anyone on your team. And that’s a very good thing- often products are released with poor usability because there ‘wasn’t enough time’ to test it. With these techniques, you’ll be able to test early and often, reinforcing your culture of experimentation.
15 videos
- Video: Recap on Designing for Usability
- Video: Creating a Good Test Suite
- Video: Creating Good Test Items
- Video: Testing Your User Stories Part 1
- Video: Testing Your User Stories Part 2
- Video: Running Usability Tests
- Video: Demo: Running a Usability Test
- Video: Demo: Creating Interactive Prototypes in Balsamiq
- Video: Laura Klein on Qualitative vs.Quantitative Research
- Video: Creating Consistency
- Video: The Importance of Comparables and Prototyping
- Video: Common Terms: Wireframes, Mockups, Prototypes & MVPs
- Video: Laura Klein on Lean UX in Enterprise IT
- Video: Final Thoughts on Usability
- Discussion Prompt: How will these techniques help you?
Graded: Week 2 Quiz: Is it usable?
Graded: Peer-reviewed Assignment: Parallel Prototyping
WEEK 3
Does it break?
You’ve learned how to test ideas and usability to reduce the amount of software your team needs to build and to focus its execution.Now you’re going to learn how high-functioning teams approach testing of the software itself. The practice of continuous delivery and the closely related Devops movement are changing the way we build and release software. It wasn’t that long ago where 2-3 releases a year was considered standard. Large firms like Facebook now release new code multiple times per day. In this module, we’ll look at the delivery pipeline and step through what successful practitioners do at each stage and how you can diagnose and apply the practices that will improve your implementation of agile.
25 videos
- Video: The Team that Releases Together
- Video: The Continuous Delivery Pipeline
- Video: Getting Started with Continuous Delivery
- Video: Anders Wallgren on the Advantages of Continuous Delivery
- Video: Anders Wallgren on Getting Started
- Video: The Commit and Small Test Phase
- Video: Anders Wallgren on Unit Testing
- Video: The Job of Version Control
- Video: The Medium Test Phase
- Video: The Large Test Phase
- Video: Creating Large/Behavioral Tests
- Video: Anders Wallgren on Testing UI
- Video: Anders Wallgren on Functional Testing
- Video: The Release Stage
- Video: Anders Wallgren on Deployment
- Video: Chris Kent on Developing with Continuous Delivery
- Video: Chris Kent on Continuous Deployment
- Video: Jim Rose on Continuous Integration and Delivery
- Video: Test-Driven General Management
- Video: Narrative and the "Happy Path"
- Video: The Emergence of DevOps and the Ascent of Continuous Delivery
- Video: Design for Deployability
- Video: Anders Wallgren on Creating a Friendly Environment for Continuous Deployment
- Video: Final Thoughts
Graded: Week 3 Quiz: Did it break?
FAQs
How It Works
Coursework
Each course is like an interactive textbook, featuring pre-recorded videos, quizzes and projects.
Help from Your Peers
Connect with thousands of other learners and debate ideas, discuss course material, and get help mastering concepts.
Certificates
Earn official recognition for your work, and share your success with friends, colleagues, and employers.
Creators
University of Virginia
A premier institution of higher education, The University of Virginia offers outstanding academics, world-class faculty, and an inspiring, supportive environment. Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, the University is guided by his vision of discovery, innovation, and development of the full potential of students from all walks of life. Through these courses, global learners have an opportunity to study with renowned scholars and thought leaders.
Pricing
| Purchase Course | |
|---|---|
| Access to course materials | Available |
| Access to graded materials | Available |
| Receive a final grade | Available |
| Earn a shareable Course Certificate | Available |
Ratings and Reviews
Agile course is well structured and teaching material
I really enjoyed it, but I wish they covered more about testing software
It might sound strange, but there are only a few good courses that really deal with agile development. This course is definitly one of them. I have enjoyed the format of this course and the journey it took me through. The live interviews with experts from the industry are a great bonus to the learning. Thank you Alex!.
Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education,
partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online.
© 2018 Coursera Inc. All rights reserved.
very interesting and helpful experience. I can suggest this course to all people who want to learn something about agile. Great job mr Alex!