P7: Final Demo & Postmortem Due Sunday, 4 May 2026, 11:59PM AoE.

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.

As we’ve mentioned throughout the semester, we expect that you’ve been continuing to refine your project since your initial code submissions (P3 and P4). We expect that the application that you demo for P7 looks and feels professional—the quality of the final project is explicitly part of your grade for this sprint, and this sprint will be weighted much more heavily in the calculation of your final grade than any of the others. When the course staff interacts with your deployed application while grading, any bugs that we experience will hurt your final grade. Penalties for bugs that we have already pointed out to you (e.g., because they were present in your P3 or P4 submissions) will be even larger, so make sure that you’ve addressed all of our earlier feedback.

Presenting Your Results

In addition to your final code, 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.

The presentation itself will happen during the last two days of class. You’ll be notified of your presentation slot at least one week in advance by the course staff.

As with prior sprints, we recommend that you use LLMs to generate materials, including slides, scripts, and outlines. You may revise only through prompting. You may revise your presentation by hand, but you should try to generate it with an LLM first.

Deliverables

1. Final Presentation (12 minutes per team, strictly enforced)

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, etc.).
• Show that your backend endpoints (e.g., on Lambda/API Gateway) are live.

(Have a backup plan or recorded demo in case AWS or any other dependency 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, etc., as appropriate for your project).
• 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. For more advice on how to write a post-mortem, consult the SRE book or my 490 slides on the topic (discussion of post-mortems starts around slide 259).

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 human-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. Write your post-mortem by hand.

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. Logs of all prompts used for slides, scripts, diagrams, and the write-up (to separate individual assignments, as usual) 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
• Quality and completeness of your deployed application
• Completeness and smoothness of your live demo
• Depth and insight of your postmortem reflection
• Professionalism of your presentation and slides
• Adherence to the 12-minute time limit, which will be strictly enforced