Interning as a software quality analyst at Enexus Global has been an excellent opportunity to explore new tools and techniques and a real time experience of my learnings from Software QA and Testing, Engineering Project Management and Agile Methodology practices learned at ITU as part of my engineering management graduate program. This report covers my learnings during the internship that has helped me with my course and in exploring new ideas. To start with, my internship provider Enexus Global, is a premier software solutions and services company headquartered in the Silicon Valley with offices across the United States.
The software teams in the organization work across different projects spanning from transforming a bank with efficient business solutions to creating an e-commerce store for a Retail business giant with the latest security solutions and building a database for communicating in a hospital or clinic. Thus, the focus on software testing is paramount in the organization which provided an excellent opportunity for me to explore and learn from different teams and specialists. Interning as a software quality analyst, my responsibilities involved test run and monitoring automation jenkins jobs, failure analysis and reporting the issues mainly in regression week of the Sprint. I spent most of the time on automating backlog test cases.
My project during the internship had a customized framework which is basically a Page object model with flavors of Data driven, Keyword and UI mapping patterns. I have used Java, TestNG and Maven for dependency and project management, GitLab used for version control and Jenkins for continuous integration. The use of different tools and platforms helped me understanding and analyzing the right tool set for any given project. Since I have had experience with software Testing and I have taken testing courses at ITU, my supervisor trusted me to write script using java and being part of meetings from the beginning of this internship.
One of my job responsibilities included testing and monitoring order management system for an e-commerce application. I started by interacting with the Project Manager, Business Analysts and Developers to understand the application design and functional specifications. Then developed and integrated the application using Eclipse IDE. Further, developed Java Classes and implemented modular framework. I also developed and maintained test automation framework which was built to reduce repetitive manual testing using Selenium WebDriver, TestNG, Maven and Java. I developed libraries to record logs and to take the screenshots of failed scenarios for the test cases developed and executed.
I extensively worked with DOM and locating web elements using Id, CSS selector and XPATH. I performed manual testing of APIs using Postman and automated testing using Http Client Another major responsibility involved understanding and defining scope of testing for writing Test cases/Scenarios manually and executing the same and raising defects. I have used Boundary value analysis, Equivalence partitioning, Negative and analyzing the Risks and preparing Risk mitigation and contingency Plan. Found Defects, analyzed, prepared Defect Reports and Status Reports, performed Bug Triage, Defect tracking, and reviewed the defects using JIRA. Performed Backend testing to validate and retrieve the data from the database using SQL queries.
Scope of Testing: Executing performance scripts and Finding the root cause of the problem and providing analysis report to the development team. Another responsibility at my job is to compile defects reports for the overall defects. Besides generating data reports, I also prepared presentations for from the data reports and shared the data with my team members and supervisor. It was crucial that the testing for order management module be completed by the deadline. This was challenging to do at times because it involved collaborating with different developers, business analyst, project managers and their schedules. This resulted in a big improvement in my project-management and time-management skills.
This project also taught me the importance of communication between teammates and cross-functional teams. I realized the importance of letting the other employees know the priority and importance of this project and inspire them to start work and get the project to closure. Organizational behavior, a class that I am taking this semester made me to realize once again the importance of leadership in business and especially management.
Also, leadership is important anytime I am dealing with teammates and I want to influence them in some way or another to finish a project. The dynamics of organizational behavior at my workplace are helping me understand my class much better. The ideas and concepts that I am learning in my field of study are particularly useful in one of my major internship responsibilities, which is developing test cases and writing test scripts. This requires me to be great at time-management and project-management as well as prioritizing the most important and urgent tasks. From the beginning of the day I create a task list where I prioritize all items.
Since often-times the work I am doing involves other people, if I do decide to go and inspect the defective material and do the work I am currently doing later, I have to make sure to let them know. Therefore communication between the teams also is another important key. The organizational behavior class that I am taking is certainly helping me communicate more effectively to teammates, managers, as well as customers.
To conclude, both time-management and project-management skills, which are actually very closely related, as well as having engineering knowledge, are essential skills of a successful manager in the field of technology, and their development is one of the major goals of the ITUs Masters of Engineering Management program. Because of work experience at my internship, my project management, time-management, my leadership skills as well as engineering problem-solving expertise has greatly improved, which makes me a more successful Masters of Engineering Management student.
Since I am having a positive experience with this internship, I definitely this internship to other ITU students. Acknowledgement I would like to thank International Technological university for incorporating internship in the graduate program and approving my internship application. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the Professor at ITU for guiding and teaching me QA for software, Project Management, Engineering Practicum that has helped me in successfully completing my internship. My team members and supervisor at Enexus Global for their support and trust.
