During the second half of the semester, each student will be scheduled to give a Design Presentation related to the project.

Presentation Outline

The presentation should be roughly 8 minutes in length, and cover the following topics:

  • The chosen design for the project.
    • The chosen design should clearly reflect the overall requirements listed in the previous presentation.
  • A deep overview of design diagrams relevant to the project:
    • UML Diagrams (Class Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams, etc.)
    • Database Entity Relationship Diagrams
    • API Documentation Diagrams
    • UI Mockups & Diagrams
    • Sitemaps for Websites
  • A discussion of how the project will be tested
    • NEW These tests should clearly align with the use cases listed in the first presentation.
Presentation Diagrams

While the focus of this presentation is the design of your project, you don’t need to include an excruciating level of detail in your design diagrams. This makes them very difficult to see and understand in your presentation, and represents a large amount of unnecessary effort on your part. Some suggestions:

  • For UML class diagrams, focus on the overall structure of your application and the relationships between classes, and not on exhaustively listing all attributes and methods in each class. It should be very clear if your application is constructed following a particular design pattern, such as MVC. If your diagram includes many classes, you may wish to start by showing the overall picture and then zooming in on particular areas on later slides to give more detail.
  • For database entity relationship Diagrams, similar to UML class diagrams, focus on the overall structure and relationships between tables, and not exhaustively listing all attributes for each table. You may choose to show a few attributes for each table, or include simplified table names in your diagram to make it clear what each table contains. It should be easy to find the 1 to 1, 1 to many, and many to many relationships in your application.
  • For API documentation diagrams, it may be easier to simply list a few API endpoints and briefly describe what that endpoint does or returns. You don’t need to include a list of all possible options or ways to use each endpoint.
  • For UML sequence diagrams, we recommend only including them if you have an interesting sequence to show - don’t include one just to have one. In most cases, you don’t need to show things that are generally understood, such as the process of saving a file to a disk or making a request in a web application. Interesting sequences might include the steps taken during program startup to initialize data, a complex authentication process for a web application, or the the process that happens when a special event is triggered in a video game.

Additional Content to Include

In addition to the basic outline listed above, here is a list of some other topics you may wish to cover in your presentation, especially if it is relevant to your project:

  • The current status of the project
  • A brief initial demo of the project

Sample Presentations

You can find several previous presentations under the Files section on Canvas. Bear in mind that these may or may not be example of good presentations, they are simply ones that have been collected for sharing.

Presentation Tips

In Fall 2022, we recorded a video containing some great tips to improve your presentations. Check it out!