Summer Internship: July 2014

Monday, July 28, 2014

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

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).

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

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).

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.

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

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).

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

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

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).

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