How to give a demo presentation

Your presentation should include a slide deck and a demo.

  1. Introduce and motivate of your project. What problem is it solving, and in what way? How is it different and better than current practice? This is often a single slide.

  2. Demo your system. (This should occupy half, or a bit more, of your talk slot.) Focus on the operational use cases — how a user interacts with it — and highlight major accomplishments. If appropriate to make your demo more realistic, pre-populate any database or other data source with (possibly faked) data that a typical user would see.

  3. (Appropriate only for an intermediate demo, not for the final release.) What additional features do you plan to complete before the final release?

  4. Show your architecture. An architecture diagram has boxes and arrows. A bullet list of components is not an architecture. Don’t draw a diagram that is so detailed that the audience can not read the small text, or the audience doesn’t have time to absorb and appreciate all the detail.

  5. Discuss anything that is interesting about your implementation approach.

  6. Reflect on your experience. (This should be more than one slide and is a crucially important part of your presentation.) Discuss what you have changed from your initial plans, and what you have learned. What was surprising, that you didn’t initially expect? What advice do you wish you had had before you started, and what evidence would you have needed to heed that advice? Your reflection might touch on: open challenges and problems; your process and timeline; architecture and design; testing and tooling; and/or other topics.

    Here are some examples of what you might discuss, especially for the final presentation:

Further requirements:

Tips

Don’t waste time on anything that is obvious or that could be said identically by other teams. For example, which unit testing framework you are using is not very interesting, if you have chosen one of the most commonly cited ones on the web. As another example, don’t say in your reflection just that “We had some teammate communication problems at the beginning, but then we met more frequently and resolved them” or “We had trouble coming up to speed on the X framework.” Those statements could be said by almost any team. Instead, be more specific about concrete problems and actions.

Your time in the presentation is limited. Focus on the most important or interesting issues. Don’t waste time on minor details.

No slide should be a wall of text. You should use a large font, and your slides should be telegraphic, making the main points without being full sentences. If you write a lot of text, then the audience has to decide between reading the text and listening to your spiel. Either way, the audience will miss information and your presentation will not be as effective as it should be.

As always, the first slide or top of a document should include all team members’ full names.

Here is more advice about your presentation: How to give a technical presentation.