Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Presentation woes

I'm meant to be working on my presentation - yes, it is still not ready - but it seems hard to finish. The obstacle is whether to follow the ordering I used in my paper, which one reviewer wanted me to change, but it was too late. The topic of the paper and presentation are the metrics collected in training sessions. The topic isn't Tick-the-Code, but it needs to be explained so that the results make any sense. In the paper I explain the method twice, first in a really condensed form and later more verbosely.
For the presentation, I talk about rules and some measurements in a very detailed manner, but I haven't presented those rules in detail by then! Can I ask the audience to suspend their disbelief and wait for the details? I need to say something like "Imagine that the following names describe black-and-white rules, which find unnecessarily complex places in source code and this is how many you'd find if you had enough code". This is all true and this is how it would go on: "CALL: 46 t/h, CHECK-IN: 82 t/h and DEAD: 45 t/h, and here are the rest 10 rules with similar figures." I have to assume that the readers have no idea of CALL, CHECK-IN or DEAD at this point in the presentation. On the other hand, the audience has the paper possibly in front of them and they could be reading the Appendix, which explains each of the rules in detail. But I don't want them to be reading, I want them to be listening!

Hmm, this is a problem, and I can see how irritating it must have been for the reviewers. The reason the paper is like that is that it has four parts: The Claim, The Evidence, A Solution and The Effect. The main point is The Evidence that is supposed to support the claim that the software source code produced contains way too much unnecessary complexity in it. The Evidence is meant to show that much of the complexity in the source code is truly unnecessary as it would be feasible to get it out with A Solution like Tick-the-Code. The last part explains how the whole development process becomes more healthy with less complexity.

Another problem is of more practical nature: I'm using Keynote on my Mac to create the presentation and there seems to be some problems in converting to PowerPoint. Some pictures get placed wherever and not where I'd like to place them. Maybe I'll have to get by without pictures or effects.

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