Include all the work. One thing to be careful of is that the demos are inclusive of all the work required to build functional software. Prepare the team to demo all the parts of their work: the APIs, the infrastructure, the reliability work, and the testing. It’s important for you to cheerlead the work that isn’t customer facing.
These things don't demo well precisely because a demo doesn't help anyone to understand the decisions made in developing them. You can not just say "prepare to demo them anyway", that doesn't do anything useful.
You can do an engaging backend demo, but it’s 100x harder.
It’s the difference between demoing a new maintenance process that lets you reduce down time on your chicken nugget forming machine by 15% and letting people try a new chicken nugget recipe.
Begging all the PM’s to not be visibly disappointed when my non-web demo isn’t as shiny and fun looking as “changed the colour and position of this button”.
You can create an engaging demo for technical units of work that do not feature visual/user-understandable concepts. It's not rocket science (unless it is). A demo is nothing more than explaining a problem and then displaying the evidence that that problem has been positively impacted. Graphs are understandable by just about everyone. Before and after charts tell a story. If you measured and improved something, you can create a demo around that work. If you've fixed a bug, you can create a demo around that work.
Suggesting that demos are somehow unrelated to non-web/non-FE units of technical work is just nonsense.
As I said elsewhere, sure you can make an engaging backend demo, just like you can make an engaging hacking scene in a movie. It’s just a lot harder though than making an engaging chase sequence.
If you added a cool animation to a button, the work is the demo. You don’t need to do any extra work, make any extra graphs, or explain very much of anything. Literally everyone will get it.
Also I’ve been at countless places that insist graphs and charts aren’t demos, but still insist backend teams do demos. This usually ends up with hitting an API with curl while everyone’s eyes glaze over.
> Also I’ve been at countless places that insist graphs and charts aren’t demos, but still insist backend teams do demos. This usually ends up with hitting an API with curl while everyone’s eyes glaze over.
Then your gripe is not with demos, or frontend. Your gripe is with bad orgs. Which has nothing to do with demos or development practice.
1. That completely ignores my first point, that engaging backend demos are inherently more difficult.
2. In nearly 20 years of doing this, I've never seen an org that got backend demos right, which to me says more about demos than it does about the organizations.
The word "demo" implies that you're going to see some live use of the thing, so while I disagree with it, I can understand what leads managers to say they don't want to see a slide presentation of graphs and charts.
No one wants to do "Power Point Presentation Driven Development", but for a lot of backend teams that's the only practical option for regular demos.
> 1. That completely ignores my first point, that engaging backend demos are inherently more difficult.
:shrug: I guess? I don't really agree but don't really see the validity in debating perceived difficulty.
> 2. In nearly 20 years of doing this, I've never seen an org that got backend demos right, which to me says more about demos than it does about the organizations.
Again, :shrug:, I have not experienced the difficulty you're describing across a wide range of companies and teams.
> The word "demo" implies that you're going to see some live use of the thing,
Maybe herein lies the problem? Because I don't agree with this statement at all, nor have my teams and companies.
> No one wants to do "Power Point Presentation Driven Development"
I do. I have. I will continue to, as I would call these "demos", and they continue to do well. Although I will add that I prefer jupyter notebooks to powerpoint for some types of demos.
Whilst I agree with you, there’s a definite frustration of demo-ing some complex backend work or bug fix and having PM’s eyes glaze over because your massive effort improving the infrastructure simply isn’t as shiny and easy as FE change. Got graphs? They don’t care, that’d mean they’d need to understand and that’s haaaaaard.
