Dry run Presentation

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The dry run presentation will be done on Tuesday Dec 8th during regular class time.

You must contact your advisor (via Slack or Piazza) to decide at what time you will make your presentation. Each presentation should last about 15-20 minutes. There will be about 5 minutes for Q/A as well, for a total of 20-25 minutes. Our questions may involve asking you to try certain inputs in your application during the live demo.

danger

Show up -- All members must be present for the presentation. Absent members will receive a penlaty on their grade.

caution

If you cannot show up to class and make a presentation on Tuesday Dec 8th, work with your advisor to find an alternate time during the week of Dec 7-Dec 9 for the dry run presentation.

tip

Take this as an opportunity to make a practice presentation and get early feedback from course staff on your work. This will help you to make improvements for your final presentation.

tip

It is strongly recommended to use the deployed app online (as opposed to running it locally) for the presentation, as this will help you to make sure that the deployed app is working as expected, and give you time to fix issues (if any) before the final presentation. For the final presentation, you will be required to demo the deployed app.

Structure

You must structure your presentation as follows.

Opening remarks [1-2 minutes]

Remind us what your project is about and what problem does it solve.

  • We know what you've been working on but a brief overview helps to set the scene.
  • You must choose one team member to deliver the opening remarks.
  • You may use slides (or other visuals) to supplement the delivery.1

What does your application do? [6-7 minutes]

This is about the functional requirements (User Stories) you've written at the onset of your project. Here is the time to show us what your application does.

  • We need a live demo (don't use slides, screenshot, etc.)
  • Do not waste time showing us trivial features like how user can signup or login to the application. (Unless that's an essential aspect of the app.)
  • Strategize and prioritize: we want to see a demo of core "must-have" features that distinguishes your app from others.
  • Show us you've delivered what you've set out to do and pepper it up with features that make us go "Wow!"
  • All team members must participate; perhaps plan for each member to demo one User Story.
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You should all have the app running and each take turn sharing your screen to show us a (2-3 minutes) demo involving one User Story/functionality.

tip

Show the project works! Be sure your demo is iron-clad, test it in advance in exactly the same environment as the demo.

How does your application do it?! [6-8 minutes]

This is about the technical (behind the scene) stuff: design, architecture, code, backend, frontend, technology, APIs, databases, algorithms, etc.

  • You must have a slide show for this section.
  • Describe the high-level deployment architecture, in particular any distribution, web interaction, database used, etc.
  • Next, present a high-level overview of design, likely via a UML class diagram. Don't show us a huge busy diagram of all classes in your code-base. Instead, make it about most interesting sections of the design. In particular, the parts about the critical, core and unique aspects of your application.
  • Describe some of the complex algorithms or technologies, tools, ... you have implemented (no need to show the actual code).
  • You should organize the presentation delivery into sections divided up amongst group members.

Closing remarks [2-4 minutes]

We are interested to hear about:

  1. the limitation of your software (what it does not/cannot/will not do)
  2. the future of your software (what will happen to it after the course is over?!)
  3. the take-away from this project (yes! a moment of reflection, as a group)

You must choose one team member to deliver the closing remarks (preferably not the same person who delivered the opening remarks). You may use slides (or other visuals) to supplement the delivery.

info

You may exclude the openning remarks and closing remarks sections for the dry run presentation, but they will need to be included in the final presentation. The practice presentation must not take longer than 20 minutes and will be delivered to your advisor.


  1. If you are using slides, keep them simple. Especially, don't use too much text on the slides. ↩