Program Comprehension

Agenda

• Presentation 2 Paper Assignments
• Presentation 2 Scheduling and Rebutters
• Review of Presentation 1 slides

Updates to Presentation Requirements

Based on some things I observed during the first round of presentations, I have updated the grading requirements/criteria as follows.

No periods at the end of bullet points or lines of text

Periods add distracting visual information, and serve no purpose because bullet items are really just lists of keywords anyway.

Informative headings

Headings should provide meaningful information to the audience. Avoid “Introduction”, “Background”, etc. headings; instead, do something like this “Background: Cognitive Load Theory”.

One idea per slide

Avoid slides which are presenting too many different ideas or are trying to make multiple points. Each slide should have a single cohesive message that it is trying to convey. If you have a slide that contains too many ideas, either break it up into multiple slides, or drop some of the ideas (if they’re non-essential).

Proper spacing around parentheses

Which spacing around the parentheses is correct?

1. Application Programmer Interface (API)
2. Application Programmer Interface(API)
3. Application Programmer Interface ( API )
4. Application Programmer Interface( API )

The answer is 1. Avoid the others.

Use proper capitalization

Bullet points should be in sentence-case, like this:

Participants made many mistakes

Not like this:

Participants Made Many Mistakes

Or weird capitalization, like this:

Participants made many Mistakes

Headings should be in sentence- or title-case. Whichever one you choose, use it consistently!

Title-case looks like this:

Information Foraging during Software Maintenance

The exact rules for title-case vary from style guide to style guide. Here is a pretty good set of rules to follow:

https://capitalizemytitle.com/

Quoting from this page:

In general, the following capitalization rules apply across the four styles in title case:

• Capitalize the first word in the title
• Capitalize the last word in the title
• Capitalize the important words in the title

Important words in that last bullet generally refer to:

• Adjectives (tiny, large, etc.)
• Adverbs (quietly, smoothly, etc.)
• Nouns (tablet, kitchen, book)
• Pronouns (they, she, he)
• Subordinating conjunctions (as, so, that)
• Verbs (write, type, create)

Words Not Capitalized in Title Case

While the above words are generally capitalized in titles regardless of style, there are some words that are generally not capitalized. These include short words and conjunctions:

• Articles (a, an, the)
• Coordinating Conjunctions (and, but, for)
• Short (less than 5 letters) Prepositions (at, by, from)