Team Presentation Guidance

 

Overview: The final presentation will be a 30-35 minute stand-up PowerPoint presentation to the class and interested faculty covering your accomplishments for this semester, including:  (1)  your project design, (2) your progress (as measured against your initial plans), (3) a capability demonstration, and (4) your future (next semester) plans.
 
bullet Design:  With only 30-35 minutes for the entire presentation, you clearly do not have the time cover all the details of your design.  Therefore, spend your time helping the class understand your overall problem architecture (i.e., what are the major components and how are they related) and perhaps delve into a few interesting features of your design (e.g., how the application is hosted in its environment, multi-threading, unique in-memory data structures, or core algorithms).  During the design discussion, I hope to hear about and see concrete evidence that you've thought deeply about your problem and the solution you are formulating to solve it, so you may want to include some alternative design ideas that were eliminated in favor of the final design. 
 
bullet Progress:  This final presentation is intended to communicate your progress in your project.  So focus on your accomplishments---what did you get done this semester (beyond the documents).  To this end, I am mostly interested in what development work you have accomplished to date.  Therefore, I'd like to see refinements of your class (or component) definitions which appeared in your SDD and prototype code demos (e.g., mock GUIs, compatibility with required system software such as JBOSS, DB interactions, GUI techniques (e.g., drag and drop), communication across interfaces, simple displays such as game play or package management, etc.).  Please note, however, don't just show me source code---show me what the source code does and organize your demos so they communicate the purpose in context of what you are demonstrating.  When talking about your progress, strike a good balance between the important and the trivial.  Please do not downplay your accomplishments (e.g., let me know about the design you created---and perhaps then re-recreated as you understood the problem better); share with us those things that you think are most important.  However, please do not attempt to embellish your accomplishments by telling me all the mundane things you accomplished or about the things that you're "going to do soon", or are "almost complete", or will be "completed over the Christmas break."  Just the facts---what did you get done this semester.
 
 
bullet The Future:  I don't fully expect you to know every task that you'll need to accomplish in the Spring semester.  However, I do expect that you have a broad-based plan for reaching your project goals.  Spend a few minutes outlining those plans.  Certain questions that would be appropriate to address in this part of your presentation are:  When will you have a complete application?  Who will test it and when and how (do the test cases already exist)?  When will optional features be addressed?  How often do you plan to get feedback from the customer or target users? Basically, let me know how you plan to have a tested, core application delivered by the middle of February and a final application by the end of March.  That is, I want you to have a realistic schedule for next semester in place before you depart for Christmas break.  I will be skeptical of schedules which rely on significant development efforts during the break---seeing that such a schedule is usually risky.
 
bullet The Demonstration:  You can either work the demonstration into your presentation (generally right before you address future plans and take questions) as you go along, or you can save the demo for the end.  The bottom line is that I would like to see that you have made some real progress toward implementing the solution you've designed.