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. The last slide needs to review those takeaways. Consider capturing lessons learned about software process, lessons learned about the technology you used, pithy observations about using genAI on projects, alternative technologies that you tried but abandoned, or some other takeaway that the other students are not likely to know but will help them in future projects.

• 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, discuss 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.

• Keep presentations to between 15 and 20 minutes. Ask for suggestions if you are having problems finding meaningful material to present. Remember your goal is to have clear takeaways for people who are not on the project and to get feedback on future directions. Practice once or twice to check length (but don’t overpractice), and if you are at 20 minutes or more then cut any material that students in the room will already know.

• In the spring semester, 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 presentation, talk about lessons learned and how successful you were at applying the Scrum model. Also identify process improvements you want to try during the remainder of the fourth sprint.

• 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."

• Consider adding a slide illustrating one or two ways in which the team used generative AI on their projects. The goal is to give other teams good ideas; there is no need to report anything if you do not think your methods were “new.”

• 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.

It's important to stay within your time limits. You won't be able to present everything listed above, so pick and choose 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

• Mirror your laptop screen, do not use the Extend feature. It is almost impossible to guide your mouse on an extended display with the screen behind you.
• 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 main branch (or the dev branch in the fall) unless your instructor approves otherwise in advance. Where appopropriate, demos should be on a seperate server (not localhost).
• 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 all presentations, 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 main
2. Clear takeaways, especially on process
3. Practiced; having an appropriate length
4. Good audience member

Authors: Robert W. Hasker with edits by other instructors.