Week 10

Week 10:

• Current Week Objectives - Perform SAT testing for project


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• Last week we were supposed to have finished all the work for our Sprint 8. Unfortunately, we were not able to finish all our stories so we are working fast this week to complete them all. Due to the amount of stories that need to be SAT tested, I helped SAT test so we could finish all the stories this week. While SAT testing, I learned a lot about SAT testers, TSM's (Test Scenario Matrix) - which is what the testers work off of to see what acceptance criteria needs to be met, and more about the project functionality. 
• During this week, I was able to finish the IT Position document I was working on over the course of the internship. During my Week 5 post, I mentioned that I planned on sharing this document with other interns so they can get the opportunity to read about the key responsibilities of certain IT Positions, such as a Business System Analyst, System Acceptance Tester, User Centric Designer, User Interface Technical Lead, Mid-Tier Line Manager, etc. I started typing this up when an intern asked if I could tell them what I learned from shadowing my team members, and decided to share it with everyone. I will provide a link to the document. 
•  Initially, my internship would have ended this August 1st, but I have been able to extend the internship by two additional weeks. Since there is a business need in my department, they were pleased to have me stay for another two weeks when I asked them. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 40 hours during my tenth week (July 28th -  August 1st).
• Total Hours Worked: 375.7 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Investigate an issue related to a Drools rule not firing when a certain condition is met that the Tech Lead asked me to look into


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - System Acceptance Testing


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 9

Week 9:

• Current Week Objectives - Prepare for Capstone Presentation and work on new story


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• During our second last week, we were asked to prepare a 5 minute speech to give to the other IT interns and to HR about what we have learned during our internship. This was key to showing HR how much we were really able to absorb from the internship and apply on our projects. 
• My new story for this week involved reconfiguring the code in the project. Previously, our code called a certain service that was being phased out for a new service that is much more reliable. I had to change the code where appropriate to meet the acceptance criteria and enable us to use data from the new service. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 40 hours during my ninth week (July 21th - July 25th).
• Total Hours Worked: 335.7 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Receive new story and additional work


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - Learned more about interfaces and their function


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 8

Week 8:

• Current Week Objectives - Increase Project Coverage


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• This week I continued to create more unit tests to increase the code coverage of the project. In the process, I ran into scenarios where a class I had to create a unit test for relied on another class which relied on another class, etc. I learned how to mock objects for the purpose of testing. I learned about EasyMock and NiceMock. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 40 hours during my eighth week (July 14th - July18th).
• Total Hours Worked: 295.7 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I will be given a new story to work on and will be in charge of running the demo during my team's Sprint Review, where the managers and principal of the project will be. 


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - How to mock objects


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 7

Week 7:

• Current Week Objectives - Attend Career Interest Meeting and Increase Project Coverage


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• At the beginning of the week I had the opportunity to run scrum for one day. I learned about the responsibilities a scrum master has and the knowledge they need to have to be able to ensure project is completed quickly and efficiently. I also had to learn about all the stories the team members were working on to be able to run scrum. 
• This meeting I had an interview with HR for future opportunities at Vanguard. I expressed my interest in returning to Vanguard next summer in the Technology Leadership Program (TLP) which is a 2 year program that has three rotations in different positions throughout Vanguard. In one rotation you can be developing in Mid-Tier in Java, and then be switched to UI developing in Javascript or Java. 
• My story this week was to increase the coverage of the project; I had to create more J-Units to ensure all possible conditions were covered. I also learned about TDD (Test Driven Development) in the process, which is where you write a test class before writing the class that the test class is for. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 38.2 hours during my seventh week (July 7th - July11th).
• Total Hours Worked: 255.7 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I will be working on the same story, increasing the coverage of the project. 


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - TDD


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 6

Week 6:

• Current Week Objectives - Attend Sprint Review/Planning, complete stories, write career interest statement and shadow remaining team members


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• This week marked the end of the current Sprint. We attended Sprint Review as a team to inform the managers of the project, and the principal what the progress of our release is. We had no demo to present at the end of this release. I volunteered to run the demo at the end of the next Sprint (end of July) to gain experience leading a Sprint Review. 
• After Sprint Review, we had a four hour long Sprint Planning meeting to create stories necessary for the completion of the release from the requirements document. 
• This week, we were informed that if we are interested in coming back to work for Vanguard after our internship ends, we should write a career interest statement about what we want to do long-term and how we would fit into the program. I expressed my interest in returning back in the TLP (Technical Leadership Program). The TLP offers three eight month rotations around the company, gaining experience in different positions. They also install leadership knowledge through meetings and experience in the program. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 39.2 hours during my sixth week (June 30th - July 4th).
• Total Hours Worked: 217.5 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I should have Job Description document I am typing up about all the IT positions in my team completed. 


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - Learned how to write better J Unit tests and more about JAXB


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 5

Week 5:

• Current Week Objectives - Shadow team members and attend mandatory Intern meetings


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• This week I was able to shadow a Product Owner, UI Tech Lead, Developer, and UCD. 
• I am in the process of writing up an in depth description of each IT position and the key responsibilities associated with the position. I plan on sharing it with the other interns at Vanguard, so that they can learn more and use that knowledge in their groups. I was asked by a manager to send the document to him when I am done so that they can give it to new interns in the future. When I am finished I will attach a link here to access the document.
• To understand what I will be doing next, I need to understand the business side of the project and financial terms I was not familiar with. I spent the week learning about this. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 39.00 hours during my fifth week (June 23rd - June 27th).
• Total Hours Worked: 178.3 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I will have overviews with a Mid-Tier developer, and Database Programmer. 


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - Learned finance terms and business of Vanguard. Learned about JAXB, similar to serialization and deserialization in C#. 


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 4

Week 4:

• Current Week Objectives - Complete my assigned stories and shadow team members


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• During this week, I asked my team members if they could give me an overview of their position and if I could possibly shadow them. Doing this allowed me to learn about different IT positions and how they all integrate together.
• My first overview was with a Business System Analyst (BSA). He informed me of his roles, which includes creating the project requirements, attending meetings with the business department to clarify tasks in the IT department, and running Scrum meetings in absence of the Scrum master. 
• My second overview was with a SAT tester. SAT testers check out the functionality of their team for the upcoming release, and report back to the team if they find detects. Their objective is to try to break the code written by the developers to find an error, if there is one. 
• During the previous weeks I had someone with me when I wrote code because of the complexity of the project and the dependency one class had on several other components. This week I was able to code on my own, now that I have a better understanding of how everything works.
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 39.00 hours during my fourth week (June 16th - June 20th).
• Total Hours Worked: 139.3 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I will have overviews with the Tech Lead, Product Owner, UCD, and Database/Developer members on my team. 


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - I learned how various positions integrate together to complete a project. The Product Owner has the vision of the project, BSA records the project requirements, Developers write the code, SAT testers verify that the  code works, etc. I will learn more next week of the other positions required on an IT team. 


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 3

Week 3:

• Current Week Objectives - Attend Sprint Review, Sprint Planning and complete more stories. 


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• During this week, my team completed their sixth Sprint. We attended a sprint review, where the scrum master informed the project managers of the milestones completed in Spring 6 and what we aimed to complete during the next Sprint. The managers made sure we are staying on track with their vision of the project. 
• Soon after, we had Sprint Planning, which was a four hour discussion of the stories we needed to complete, how we would complete them, and who we would assign them to. I was assigned three stories to complete,  all related to JBoss Drools business rules construction. On Friday, I completed another story and submitted it for code review to the team. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 39.00 hours during my third week (June 9th - June 13th).
• Total Hours Worked: 100.3 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I will continue to my next story. To complete this story, I need to understand how the project as a whole interacts with a background service, called Rebal, which passes data to the MidTier in our team. Our goal is to validate the data using business logic and pass it on to the UI team. 


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - I learned to create business rules using JBoss Drools and learned more about the project. 


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 2

Week 2:

• Current Week Objectives - To learn more about the project, JBoss Drools, more about Agile methodology, and to learn all the crazy acronyms that are commonly used by my team.


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - 
• At the beginning of the week, I had the IDE on my computer. We use a source code management program called SVN (Apache owned), to check in code and share with our team mates. The software is very similar to Team Foundation Server we learned in IST 240. I went through the Java code in the project to understand it and to see if there was anything I didn't know so I could look it up. I had to learn about Drools, which is a production rule system to create business rules. It is Java based.
• I was assigned a story to create a specific business rule using Drools. I completed it during this week. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 38.30 hours during my second week (June 2nd - June 6th).
• Total Hours: 61.3 hours


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I will find out what my next story will be during the Scrum meeting on Monday. I will also continue to learn about the project and everything it is capable of doing. It is important to understand the project completely before working on it.


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired - I learned to create business rules using JBoss Drools and learned about SVN.


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Week 1

Week 1:

• Current Week Objectives - During the first three days of my first week, I had to attend mandatory orientation for all new interns. The orientation consisted of learning more about the company, participating in team building exercises, and being debriefed on the current project I will be working on. I was assigned to Mid-Tier on the project, which involves programming in Java.


• Current Week Accomplishments/Hours Worked - Due to the software not being previously installed on my work computer, I was unable to contribute to the team project during the first week. I had to submit a request to get the IDE, Spring Tools Suite (Eclipse with a Spring Framework) installed before I could start working. 
• Hours Worked: I completed a total of 23 hours during my first week (May 28th - May 30th).


• Next Week Objectives - Next week I will attend my first Scrum meeting with my team. I was unable to do so this week due to intern meetings and orientation. I will find out my responsibilities and what my position in Mid-Tier entails.


• Key Lessons Learned/New Skills Acquired- I learned a lot about Vanguard as a whole, and how seriously they take their mission. They are dedicated to their clients and the structure of their company proves it. Unlike other companies, Vanguard is client-owned. This means Vanguard clients own Vanguard funds, which in turn own the company. There are no third party management companies, which enables Vanguard to keep their management costs low. The better they perform, the more money the company takes in. This structure persuades the company to genuinely help their clients. I hope to learn more and improve my skill set in the coming weeks.


• Issues and Concerns - N/A

Introduction

This summer I will be interning at Vanguard, from May 28th to August 1st (a total of 10 weeks).

This blog will reflect my weekly objectives, accomplishments, and lessons/techniques that I have learned during my internship.