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Project 7: Final Demo & Postmortem

Learning Goals

  • Learn how to clearly and professionally present a technical software project.
  • Learn how to communicate architectural decisions, deployment processes, and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Learn how to conduct a structured postmortem analyzing team practices, project successes, and failure points.
  • Learn how to prepare a high-level demo of a deployed application.

Project Context

Across P1–P6, you designed, implemented, tested, and deployed a full-stack application. Project 7 is your final sprint, in which you demonstrate your deployed app and present a reflective postmortem on your development process.

You will give a 12-minute team presentation that includes:

  1. A live demo of your deployed application
  2. An overview of your testing & deployment process
  3. A structured postmortem (lessons learned, surprises, team process, what you’d do differently)

This presentation is your opportunity to demonstrate both your functional application and your mastery of the engineering practices taught in this course.

As with prior sprints, you should use LLMs to generate materials, including slides, scripts, and outlines. You may revise only through prompting.

Deliverables

1. Final Presentation (12 minutes per team)

Your presentation must follow this structure:

(1) Live Demo (6 minutes)

Show the core features of your deployed application. At minimum:

  • Walk through your primary user stories.
  • Demonstrate frontend → backend integration.
  • If applicable, demonstrate any nontrivial workflows (authentication, complex functionality, etc.).
  • Show that your frontend is active on Amplify (or VS Code Extensions Marketplace).
  • Show that your backend Lambda/API Gateway endpoints are live.

(Have a backup plan or recorded demo in case AWS decides to be mischievous during your time slot.)

(2) Testing & Deployment Process (2 minutes)

Explain the engineering behind your deployment environment:

  • How your GitHub Actions workflows run your tests.
  • How your CD pipeline deploys your backend to Lambda and your frontend to Amplify (or the Extension Marketplace).
  • Where secrets are stored and how permissions are granted.
  • How integration tests run in CI and how failures impact deployment.

(3) Postmortem (4 minutes)

Reflect on your engineering process:

  • Successes: What went well in development, testing, deployment, and team collaboration?
  • Failures / surprises: What broke? What caused major delays? What took far longer than expected?
  • Process evaluation:
  • Did LLM-driven development help?
  • Did your feature-branch workflow work smoothly?
  • How did your testing strategy evolve?
  • Lessons learned:
  • What would you do differently if starting again?
  • What best practices will you adopt in future software projects?

Your postmortem should be honest, analytical, and reflective.

2. Slide Deck

Prepare a slide deck (Google Slides, PowerPoint, or PDF) containing:

  1. Title slide: team name, app name, team members
  2. App overview: problem statement, target user
  3. Demo roadmap
  4. CI/CD overview with diagrams and workflow charts
  5. Deployment overview (LLM-generated AWS architecture diagram encouraged)
  6. Postmortem: successes, failures, lessons
  7. Future work: 3–5 possible next features

All slides must be generated using LLMs and refined only through prompting.

3. Postmortem Write-Up (1-2 pages)

Submit a written postmortem expanding on your presentation reflection. Include:

  • Problem summary: what you built and why
  • Technical accomplishments: features, architecture, test coverage, deployment stack
  • Team workflow: branching strategy, communication, division of labor
  • Bottlenecks & failures
  • LLM usage analysis
  • How effective were LLMs?
  • How many prompt iterations were needed for key tasks?
  • How did you improve confusing or incorrect outputs?
  • Roadmap for future work

This document must be drafted entirely with LLM support.

4. Turn-In Instructions

Submit a single document or folder containing:

  1. Link to your deployed frontend
  2. Link to your deployed backend API endpoint
  3. Link to your slide deck
  4. PDF or MD version of your postmortem write-up
  5. Copy-paste of all prompts used for slides, scripts, diagrams, and the write-up
  6. Names and versions of all LLMs used
  7. A short statement verifying that all artifacts were LLM-generated and edited only via prompting

Evaluation Criteria

Your grade will be based on:

  • Technical clarity of your application, testing, and deployment
  • Completeness and smoothness of your live demo
  • Depth and insight of your postmortem reflection
  • Professionalism of your presentation and slides
  • Compliance with LLM-generation requirements
  • Adherence to the 12-minute time limit