Some weeks ago I had the privilege to give a lecture at Evol@Mons - Research Seminar on Software Evolution.

My lecture had two parts:

• the first was a quick overview of the Moose analysis platform, and
• the second was based on the work I carried out during my PhD and it was about modeling history to understand software evolution.

For the second part I already had the story and the slides from my PhD defense, but I took the opportunity to refresh them. You can take a look at the two sets of slides below (the original one on top, and the new one is below):

The structure is similar because I am happy with the story. I should be, because I told it hundreds of times. However, there are several differences.

First, I now used slightly more slides (95 vs. 70 including transitions) while the talk was still 45 minutes. This means about 2 slides a minute. At first sight this seems like quite a bit, but if you take a closer look most slides are transition ones that just lead the path from one conceptual place to another. The main reason for more slides is mainly due the story being more refined and to me being more comfortable with it.

Second, I took away all embellishments from the template. Even though the original template was not too crowded, it still had a couple of rather useless lines, my name, the slide number and a logo of the current part on the top right. The design was clearly crafted along what used to be possible in PowerPoint, but now I find it completely irrelevant.

In particular, I find adding my name on each slide irrelevant because it can just distract from the actual content. As for the lines, I still cannot understand why I thought that restricting the useable area on the slide is any useful.

The same goes for slide numbers. The reason for numbers on the slide is to provide the audience with a means to track the progress. This is a useful measure when slides have a similar weight and when they dictate the rhythm. In my case, slides have no particular weight, they just accompany the talk at the pace dictated by the story. Still, it is useful to offer some sense of progress, especially during a long talk. My solution was to number the 6 big logical parts that come after the introduction of the model.

Third, I took away most of the text, too. The original slides were designed to have one sentence on top that would summarize the slide. This type of design goes along the lines of the Crafting Scientific Presentations book. In the new slides almost all text is gone. The reason is that most of the content is now in the spoken talk. The text that is on slides is mainly used for raising a problem or for drawing a lesson.

I leave it for you to judge, but I felt much better with this second set of slides.