Reflecting on a Demo

Last Friday I gave a TestComplete webinar to 314 people. The topic was Creating Script Extensions, which lets people extend the standard capabilities of TestComplete. I think it went really well overall, and I wanted to share a few of the things I learned/found helpful.

Let the audience know where you are in your presentation. I had a really short slide deck; most of the slides were used to track where I was in my agenda. This served as a transition between topics, and helped people keep track of where we were in the overall presentation.

Presenter Mode is a wonderful thing. PowerPoint 2007 has this great feature called Presenter Mode. This lets you have your presentation shown on one monitor, and your slides along with speaker notes and a timer on another. I was able to refer to my notes for each slide without having to print them off. This helped keep the presentation smooth, since I didn't have to go back and forth between a printout and what was displayed on screen.

Always have a cheat sheet. A good chunk of the demonstration involved teaching people how to write the code needed for a script extension. I had a blank Notepad++ window on the monitor I was presenting on, and on my other monitor I had the complete code I was writing, along with comments to help explain the code. This was insurance against me having a complete brain cramp while I was coding.

Load your applications ahead of time. No one wants to watch splash screens load or watch someone stumble through explorer windows and shortcut clicks. Have everything loaded in advance, and the demo goes smoother.

Order your applications in the taskbar. I used several programs during the course of the demonstration; PowerPoint, TestComplete, Notepad++, Paint.NET, Windows Explorer, and a couple of Notepad windows for my cheatsheets. It helps keep things smooth when the items in the Taskbar are ordered according to the order in which they'll be used. That way, you aren't searching for anything. There's a great little utility called TaskBar Shuffle that lets you reorder items in the Taskbar, in case you don't open apps in the order in which they'll be needed.

Poll your audience often. I was giving this demo remotely, so I couldn't see my audience. That meant I had no idea if they were engaged or not. I made it a point to ask them questions as I was presenting. Most of these were simple yes or no questions, but it was enough to keep them involved.

Have a wingman (or wingwoman). I had a co-worker riding shotgun with me during the demo. It was his job to answer questions about the telephone number needed to call in, and to alert me to any audio or visual problems that people were experiencing. This freed me up from having to respond to certain questions during the demonstration, and provided a mechanism to head trouble off before it became serious.

Breathe. I was really excited about giving this session. My energy level was pretty high, and I felt a little out of control in the first few minutes. I made myself slow down and take a breath, and was able to stay on a good pace for the session without rushing through things.

Record yourself. My wingman also recorded the demonstration. We wanted to be able to send this demo to clients who couldn't make it to the live session, but it's also a great tool for self-improvement. For example, I thought I had a really good handle on not saying "um" while presenting, but in listening to the recording I hear myself saying it, especially when I'm answering questions toward the end of the session. I'm going to keep working on that.

If you'd like to take a look at the recording, you can see it here (it's about 90 mins long). I'd welcome any feedback you can give.