Each team will present their projects:

• The primary goals of the presentation are to review progress (particularly from the user's point of view) and to discuss learned lessons around process, dev ops, documentation, client communication, and other relevant topics.

• Your primary audience is the other students in SDL. A successful presentation is one that gives good takeaways for the other students. In particular, you can assume everyone in the room understands Scrum, project roles, and has had similar experiences as you. Highlight issues and experiences that are specific to your project.

• 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.

• During the final exam period, 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. Do not pad a short presentation just to meet this requirement. Please find real meaningful things to share instead.

• 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 final presentation for SWE 3710, 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.