Final Report for SDL

Each team will present their projects:

• Your primary audience is the other students in SDL. A successful presentation is one that gives good takeaways for the other students.
• Give a small bit of introduction to the project - at most a couple slides - but quickly move on to the demonstration. Knowing what the system does is critical to understanding any other points you make, and seeing the system working is far superior to just hearing about it.
• Other students may know a bit about your project, but they will not remember details. Describe goals and remind students who the customer is.
• The demonstration should make it clear what was implemented this term.
• At some point in the presentation, discuss what is planned for the next term. If it is the last term for the project, discussed future directions
• The expectation is that all students will present a share of the material and that all will either help prepare the presentation, at least in review.
• Practice your presentation! This includes practicing the demonstration.
• When there are 4 teams, the maximum for each team is 20-25 minutes. When there are 5, the maximum is 20. You will lose points for exceeding your maximums. Be sure to leave a couple minutes for questions.
• All presentations must be at least 15 minutes in length. If you are having difficulty finding material to cover, discuss this with your instructor.
• In the 2nd and 3rd quarters, a significant part of your presentation should be about your process improvement goals, what you did to improve the team's process, and an evaluation of your efforts to improve process. In the first quarter, talk about lessons learned and how successful you were at applying the Scrum model.
• If you learned something useful about the technologies in your project, you may discuss that. Otherwise, just mention the one or two core technologies for context.
• Strongly consider discussing what the team did well and where they could have improved. Show storypoint burndowns and other charts if they add information, don't simply display a chart and say "here's our burndown."

It's important to stay within your time limits. You won't be able to present everything listed above, so pick and chose what you think will be useful. Remember that your goal is to give other students good takeaways. The process improvement discussion is the most likely takeaway for other students, though experience with the chosen technology can also be useful.

Do's and Dont's of Presentations

• Do practice at least enough to have confidence in what you are saying.
• Do practice all demos, including making sure all details will work as anticipated at the presentation.
• All demos are to use software from the master branch unless your instructor approves otherwise in advance.
• Avoid overwhelming the audience with information. You are trying to get one or two points across about your successes or failures, not make attempt to make the audience into experts about your project.
• Avoid the sprint play-by-play; be purposeful in what is presented.
• Do not interrupt other students during presentations, including students on your own team. Discuss during preparation, not during presentation.
• Be attentive during the presentations by others: turn off cell phones, computers.
• Be there! Attendance is required at the final presentation, and being late will impact your grade.

Submit a PDF of your presentation as instructed.

Scoring Presentations

Different instructors will evaluate presentations in different ways, but one model is to break the total points into four areas:

1. Strong, early demonstration from master
2. Clear takeaways
3. Practiced; having an appropriate length
4. Good audience member

Author: Robert W. Hasker; last updated Nov. 11, 2019