knowledge-kitchen / course-notes

Project Presentations in a Software Engineering Course

Format

Basic guide

Teams present their projects in class.

• team members must equally share the responsibility of preparing and delivering the presentation
• you are heavily discoraged from presenting a slide show (i.e. a presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Google Slides, or equivalent).
• organizing your thoughts by creating a written outline for your team to use internally when planning the presentation is heavily encouraged. Your team should not appear disorganized or not know what they are doing.
• there is also absolutely no need to mimic the “TED Talk” style of presentation. Present in a way that makes you feel comfortable while allowing your audience to understand what you are doing and saying.

Slide show rules

If you do insist on presenting a slide show, abide by David JP Phillips’ rules for avoiding “Death by PowerPoint”:

• deliver only one message per slide
• keep text in each slide short and focused on supporting the message you are discussing
• no more than six objects on each slide (an object is anything - text or image)
• speak like a human… don’t just read the text on the slide
• make important stuff bigger and more high-contrast than less important stuff on the screen
• use dark background colors and light text color… do not make the slides brighter than you are

Topics

The following is a baseline of topics to be covered by presentations. Please adapt this list to your project. Remove topics from this list that are irrelevant to you and your project or provide unnecessary distraction. Add topics to this list that speak more to your interests and your project’s proclivities. Most importantly, keep your presentation short, focused, and try to make it conversational.

Project Summary

What is it?

• Title - give a short pithy name.
• Elevator pitch - why should anybody care?

Users

If you have done any user research, discuss who are you making this for.

• What tendencies and/or limitations does this audience have that you took into consideration when designing your project?
• What need does this fill?
• Any user observation of your target audience.
• Any testing of the project with your intended audience.

If you have not done any user research, do not waste time on this.

Demonstration

All teams must demonstrate their products live.

• show and describe each of the core use cases
• make the demonstration suitable for someone who knows nothing about your project: concise, focused, but not rushed.

The system

How did you do it?

• Do not show any code during your presentation.
• If any aspect of the system is “boilerplate” and obvious to anyone in the course, do not spend time talking about it.
• Discuss only any hardware/software that is not boilerplate.
• Do not waste time talking about things that are common to all software of this type.
• Any particular unexpected challenges you faced, not including having to learn how to do basic things.

Challenges and lessons learned

What do you know now that you didn’t now before?

• Was this project more or less work than you imagined at the beginning?
• Any specific challenges that consumed a large amount of your team’s effort.
• Did you learn anything interesting?

This is not a forced confession. Honest thoughts are welcome, and you’re welcome to not answer these question at all if they’re not relevant or interesting to you.