Key Information
About the content
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 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.
Syllabus
- Week 1 - Should we build it? Did it matter?
Ultimately, agile’s backbone is the substitution of observable results over the false certainty of elaborate plans. You’ve learned to avoid waste by validating problems/needs and user motivation before investing in software. Putting that testing into practice ... - 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, we’ll look at how to diagnose, design and execute phase-appropriate user testing as a standard practice. Anyone can l... - Week 3 - Does it break?
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 twice a da... - Week 4 - Your Continuous Delivery
You've learned about the continuous delivery pipeline and how to improve cycle time. In this module, you'll apply that learning to improve your own processes.
Instructors
Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business
Content Designer
The University of Virginia (also known as UVA, UVa, Virginia) is located on the east coast of the United States in Charlottesville, Virginia. It has also been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. The university was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third American president.
The University of Virginia is a renowned public institution of higher education that belongs to the Universitas 21 network. Always ranked in the top 25 American universities, it is also part of the "Public Ivies", a network of the best public universities in the country, which are reputed to offer a level of education comparable to that of Ivy League institutions.
Platform
Coursera is a digital company offering massive open online course founded by computer teachers Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller Stanford University, located in Mountain View, California.
Coursera works with top universities and organizations to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in many subjects, including: physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, data science, and other subjects.
