Teaching Programming to Non-Developers

Eric asks: "I'm teaching a web application development class at a local public university. The students are seniors in the business program; the course is intended to expose them to development practice (we're using PHP and MySQL) but is not intended to turn them into developers. So what would the Slashdot community recommend within the curriculum? How would you teach web development to the managers of the future, and why?"

Comments

Re:be sure speak in their language

[mikael]

You're not thinking outside of the box and taking a holistic approach. You also have to consider the end-user experience in a thin-client multi-tiered environment and make sure it is 24/7. Otherwise you are not utilizing the Web applications infrastructure to its full potential.

I'd also teach the staff to optimize, the quality, performance and availability of pre-deployed applications across the entire project lifestyle, with important milestones including testing, tuning deployment and management of baseline targets . Functional, load, performance and scalability testing for business-critical deployment stages are critical in order to assess end-user experience with online transactions and service-level agreements.

With Enterprise-class cross-product applications the only way to keep going forward and get the maximum leverage while adding value and still maintaing competency in is to consult with all involved departments. Then you can run each idea up the flagpole, creating synergies and pushing the envelope of systemisation and business continuity at the same time. Finally you can take a heads-up view of the direction that the project is going and increase productivity (n)-Fold.