Introduction to Agile Software Development: Tools & Techniques

This is a very helpful course, but not for those just starting out with Ruby. At the time of enrollment, I was learning Ruby through its suggested Codecademy homeworks. Defnitely not enough. The quizzes were very difficult, for being semi-untimed and open-book. I watched every video and read every chapter, but there were some stumpers. The class has you create a project, but the process of which is confusing. You have the process outlined by the textbook, and then that from the homeworks. Using the textbook as a guide, it leaves out some details of creating controllers or models.

I took the class for hopes of it teaching RSpec, but the whole first part (this course) is about Cucumber. It was very annoying because my job writes tests using RSpec and Capybara -- which looks far different than Cucumber testing. I am auditing the second half the course now.

Finally, it is VERY difficult to receive help on the course. The forum (stackexchange) is poorly managed -- you cannot tell the difference between Part 1 or 2 questions. You cannot get a hold of the actual professors, only moderators/TAs that do not have the best answers. After an assignment was due, people would ask questions about their code, but the code was removed by mods as it "broke edX honor system." .... The online chat from gitter is of no help, since only 3 users, at most, are active once a day.

Background: C++, Python - 2nd year computer science student.

The course is well organized and you don't lose much time configuring your machine since they provide a ready-to-use VM.

It is more of a general software engineering course than a SAAS one, that isn't necessarily bad, but you should be aware. If you do not know Ruby, be ready to spend a few hours learning it, the first homework is very challenging (in the good way, great job there!). Regarding other homeworks, I've heard they accept faulty code but my experience says otherwise: it evaluated what I did accurately.

They use Rails as a mean to teach SAAS as well as some development practices (BDD and TDD), but I don't know to what extent it was a good call to mixture those two subjects in such a short time; this way you can only grasp the concepts and even if you complete all the assignments that won't make you comfortable using them.