About

In this course, teams of 4-6 students work with real clients (generally nonprofits and campus units) to develop or enhance SaaS apps that support the work of that client, using the Agile practices learned in CS169A: lo-fi mockups of user stories, BDD & TDD with Cucumber and RSpec, pull-request-based code reviews, continuous integration, legacy code management, and so on.

Grading criteria are based almost entirely on project work and effectiveness of engaging with your client, including getting at least one (and hopefully more than one!) pull request incorporated into the "golden" (upstream) repo for each project.

Enrollment criteria

Since capacity is limited, to enroll you must (a) join the waitlist, and (b) fill out this 1-minute survey. Michael and Armando will make decisions before the start of classes. To join the waitlist and ultimately enroll, you must:

Be a registered CS major (EECS or L&S)
Have completed CS(w)169 or CS(w)169A with a B+ or better

Note that those are necessary conditions but they don’t guarantee you will get in, since space is limited. If you meet the above criteria but are still unable to join the waitlist, please email cs-enrollments@berkeley.edu for help.

Format and attendance

Class meetings are in person and regular attendance is required to pass. If you are unable systematically to attend in person, please do not enroll.

There is no final exam but there may be short quizzes throughout the course, using PrairieLearn.
Teams of 5 or 6 will be formed by the course staff; we will let you designate at most one other enrolled student you'd like to make sure is on your team. We will not allow self-formed teams or ‘cliques’ larger than 2. We will explain our rationale during the first class meeting, but we will not respond to requests for exceptions since the answer is "no."
We are surveying real customers now, and each team will vote as a team on which customer they want to work with.
Class meetings will cover a variety of topics, depending on how projects are going:
- Brief reviews of Agile workflows/tools from CS169A
- "Clinics" where we critique/debug project design as a group
- Relevant guest speakers
- "Bootcamps" where we provide short intros to libraries, gems, technologies, etc. that might be needed by one or more projects
- Student team presentations of project progress

Workload

This is a 4-unit course, which theoretically represents 12 hours per week of work (including both in-class and out-of-class), and most students spend at least that much time on it.

Importantly, a main component of your out-of-class time will be customer meetings and team meetings, both technical and nontechnical. We will make available some scheduled class time for team work, but you need to have a sufficiently flexible schedule to be able to meet regularly with your team. If your schedule is packed and you're expecting team meetings to only occurs on nights and weekends, you might want to reconsider, since those meetings are an essential component of project progress on which grading is based.

Other useful info/links

Grading info, general project logistics info, etc.
Staff: Armando Fox and Michael Ball (instructors), Fernanda Pisconte and Yu Long (TAs), Shiv Sethi (reader/course assistant)
Google Calendar for course
Google Slides

Statement on use of course materials

Students may download, modify, and use course materials for their own personal use in any way they wish. Students may not redistribute/repost any provided course materials on any other site, for any reason, with or without being compensated. If we find you've done this, you will be unenrolled from the course and we will pursue legal action against you. This is largely to avoid our materials being available on sites whose business model is based on IP theft, such as CourseHero or Chegg.