You may have noticed that several US universities (including Stanford and UC Berkeley) are making a range of IT-related online courses available under the banner of Coursera. Course topics include machine learning, security, cryptography, natural language processing, and a range of less technical subjects such as entrepreneurship.

Most courses seem to be starting in February.

I signed up to a couple of the courses before Christmas but I just noticed that Armando Fox and David Patterson (both of UC Berkeley) are running a course entitled Software Engineering for Software as a Service which looks pretty useful for anyone interested in taking advantage of cloud infrastructure. Armando gave the closing keynote at our annual Eduserv Symposium last year and is highly recommended.

This course teaches the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails. Agile developers continuously refine and refactor a working but incomplete prototype until the customer is happy with result, with the customer offering continuous feedback. Agile emphasizes user stories to validate customer requirements; test-driven development to reduce mistakes; biweekly iterations of new software releases; and velocity to measure progress. We will introduce all these elements of the Agile development cycle, and go through one iteration by adding features to a simple app and deploying it on the cloud using tools like Github, Cucumber, RSpec, SimpleCov, Pivotal Tracker, and Heroku.

The course starts on Feb 20 and is free to join.