While the new degree will bring together lean startup and service design, an important part will be agile development too, so that students know how to use good practices to build quality software. All three of these goes well together.

A key goal of the new MSc Software Entrepreneurship is to appeal to those, who want to learn agile development in a realistic environment. By providing the startup situation on the programme of students forming teams to launch business ideas the students will have the long-term perspective of software development normally missing from the classroom. The long-term perspective means it does make sense to use agile practices such as test driven development, pair programming, and to have the #noestimates discussion too.

As students will be working on a number of startup ideas over the year, assuming that some ideas won’t work, then they will be able to try and better understand the agile practices of software development and how these contribute to developing great services. Even if some students only work on one idea, because their idea talks off, then they will still be learning how to revise and improve their agile practices during the year and will see the difference between where they started with those practices and how they changed over the year.

While the degree is about forming a startup we also want you to leave with the skills to keep that software business growing too, or to work in someone else’s startup, or an agile software house too. Knowing how to set up a development system and have it form a smooth cadence of flow, and then look to shorten your release cycle so that you can use continous deployment, are all part of the knowledge we look to share with you on this programme. These skills and approaches will serve you well wherever you go after this degree. We’re excited to see what happens.