Cosi 166 Final Deliverables

Logistics of Product Showcase

• There will be 4-5 Judges
• Each team will have 8 minutes
• We have many teams so we will be trying to keep to time

What to put into LATTE

• Presentation Slides (Powerpoint or similar) (not a link)
• Final Report (PDF) (not a link)
• Link to your team GitHub dir
• Link to your heroku deployment
• Project Portfolio Page (url)
• Brandeis Project Text File

About the presentation

• Remember, this is not a marketing or selling course
  • Don’t worry about explaining marketability, pricing, target market and so on.
  • Do explain what is the problem your product addresses, and how does it solve it?
• Deliverables are:
  • The code (github) for the product, and a link to running it on Heroku
  • A presentation (including a product demo)
  • A final report
  • A Portfolio page/site
  • Markdown file listing key links and facts
• In each of these, make sure there’s a dose of technical info about:
  • The architecture, perhaps as a “block diagram” or architectural layer diagram showing the key “actors” or “components” of your product within it’s environment.
  • The key technologies used
  • The interesting technical parts of the product
  • Examples: background processing, two factor authentication, using of web services, real time processing, complicated or hairy databases, use of mapping or GPS, use of voice, using packages outside of the usuall ruby on rails universe, interesting computer science algorithms, etc…

About the product demonstration

• This is part of the presentation, near the beginning. So do the demo around the 2nd or 3d slide. Then after the demo do the rest of the presentation.
• Take around 3 minutes to demo your product. By now, you should be able to demonstrate your product!
• Yes there may be bugs and uglyness which you will have a week to fix
• You do need to work on a demo ‘script’
• The best demo scripts tell a bit of a story where you try to ‘hook’ the listener with a scenario that they recognize

Presentation

• Make sure you include:
  • What problem are we solving. What does the product do. For who?
  • Who the team members are
  • A concluding/summary slide
• In addition, here are some more topics to inspire you. No need to cover each and every one
  • How does it work?
  • What’s interesting technically
  • A diagram of the architecture
  • What interesting Cosi concepts or algorithms?
  • Where can it be improved or expanded?
  • How would a customer deploy or adopt it?
  • Preliminary ideas on how it might make money
• Logistics
  • Should be Powerpoint, Google Presentation or whatever you prefer. (Prezo sometimes makes people dizzy)
  • All members of the team will be part of the presentation. Not all students need to talk equal amounts.
  • You should practice it at least once
  • The demo is part of the presentation, and very close to the start

Final Report

• Stylistic advice
  • QUality of an academic report or paper
  • This is a technical description of the product and project
  • We are looking for a well organized document describing the product and project
  • Check your English language writing, and use the Writing Center if needed
  • Watch out for run-on senteneces that sound like transcribed spoken language which is not appropriate in a written report.
• Purpose: explain what you did, how you did it, why you did it that way, what the challenges were, and what you would do next
• Content advice
  • What the purpose of the product is, what kind of user would want it, and what it’s functionality is.
  • Technologies used, beyond just RoR. What new and unusual tools, services, languages, and so on.
  • Interesting Engineering, how did you go beyond a vanilla web app and have to confront some engineering challenges
  • Development, deployment and testing methodologies and results.
  • Inlude at least one screenshot and also a diagram of the architecture
  • Include names and emails of the team members
• This should be between 5 and 15 pages, in pdf form

Project Portfolio Page

• Meant to showcase the results of your project
• Not the “product page” for your product. Think of what you want a future interviewer to be able to know about your product/project “at a glance”
• The contents is a high level summary of the Final Report.
• Think of it like a “poster” you would do for a conference
• Implementation details
  • An “informational” web site with a small number of pages.
  • Implement a public, static web site accessible from a single URL
  • I recommend you use the github “static” page feature, tying your Portfolio page to your github repo.
  • But there are other techniques

Markdown file describing the project,

• Just following these simpleinstructions: Brandeis Projects Description File.
• This will create the entry for your project in BrandeisProjects