On the last day of class, you will give a presentation to your peers and instructor. We will also invite the Computer Science Department to these presentations; so you may see other instructors and students in the classroom. Think of this as similar to a conference presentation.
You must attend and participate (i.e. speak) in the presentation in order to receive credit for this assignment, unless you have an excused absence.
Presentation Order (TBD)
Assignment
These presentations should take about 15 to 20 minutes each (but no more than 25 minutes, please), including time for questions from the audience. We need to leave time between each group for switching laptops and movement.
The audience for this in-class presentation will include your instructor, fellow students, and possibly students and faculty from computer science. You may, therefore, use technical terms and expect that your audience has a basic level of understanding about software development. But, they may not know a great deal about website development or Agile methodology — so be prepared to answer a broad range of technical questions and process-related questions!
Your team has a great deal of flexibility in how you want to present the current state of the software that you have been developing this term. We offer these ideas as suggestions for what you should consider including in your presentation:
- Since some of the people who may be attending do not know anything about your project, it will be helpful to briefly describe what the purpose of the software is … what is its major function and how does it help your community partner fulfill their mission? Did you start with legacy code, or is this a new project? (Be careful not to criticize former development teams … some of them may be in the audience! But you can acknowledge the challenges of learning an existing codebase.)
- It is helpful for everyone to have a brief narrative of what features, changes, or improvements were requested by the community partner. You might go back to your initial notes from the first meeting with your community partner and review the user stories or feature list.
- Bring a laptop so that you can show the current state of deployment of your project. OR – be ready to log into the podium’s computer and navigate to your project online. If it is in progress, just let us know that there are still issues to work out next term. If you are (almost) done – mention that too.
- Aim to show us how major features or the new improvements function, but you do not have to demonstrate everything that the program does.
- Since this is a technical audience, address how you have implemented behavior-driven design and test-driven development. What has testing been like? What approaches have you used in organizing your team work? How have you worked on documentation … and what tools are you using for all of the organizational, testing, and documentation work you have been doing?
- What lessons have you learned along the way?
- What recommendations do you have for next semester’s students?