The end

As with the first seminar, the notes are primarily on what James said in the seminar; the lecture slides are available on the webpage.

Notes

  • James isn’t looking for a perfect, streamlined process; be honest when something goes wrong
    • Plans aren’t perfect, so it’s good to have a justified change
  • If you found something to trivialise the implementation, then what do you do with the remaining time?
    • Remember that each team member should contribute roughly 75 hours
  • Testing
    • Some detail about all the tests, and how you went about it
    • UX needs testing too; how might we test for “intuitive UI” being fulfilled
  • Further features
    • What needs improvement and why wasn’t it produced in the time
    • What would you do with more time and resources
  • Is this a good product?
    • If you don’t actually show the product and also said “yes this is good” red flag

A good report (note the seminar slides are good for this) includes:

  • Evidence why the tools you chose are good
    • used commonly in industry?
  • no code snippets
  • Don’t repeat yourself
    • hard when many people typing, but try to keep it consistent
    • goal: reads as if it could have been written by one person
  • Level of detail
    • Don’t do line-by-line analysis or discuss initialisations of variables
    • Avoid boring discussion; discuss exciting things
  • Proof-reading
    • scan at the end to remove notes
    • keeps it consistent
    • make sure paragraphs deliver information
      • ChatGPT generates paragraphs which don’t say anything meaningful
      • don’t regurgitate definitions from the lectures
    • readability is 20% of the mark

Video:

  • justify why the metrics are good
  • showcase uniqueness of product
  • if using slides, don’t make slides the same
  • don’t do pure commercial since customer has SWE experience
    • discuss cool technical stuff
    • discuss commercial stuff as well
  • don’t try to be funny or make jokes
    • it has only worked once
    • however enthusiasm is good to see!
  • this is what determines the client prize thing
  • plan & rehearse
  • edit the video; cut out stuff
  • expect more than one person presenting/talking