This month I had three
major things I worked on at my work term at NCR. Two were related to
development and the other was related to testing. This post will describe in
detail what I have been working on in May and what I have learned so far.
Set up my development
environment
My first week and a
half of this coop work term at NCR consisted of setting up my development
environment. Through setting up my environment I began to learn how use several
new tools. These tools include maven, myeclipse10, svn repositories, Microsoft
SQL Server Express and GlassFish. I used MS SQL Server Express last summer, but
I didn’t gain experience in the setup process. Setting up my development
environment proved to be a complicated task. I ran into a lot of issues, but I
learned a lot about how Passport is set up and what to do when problems do
occur.
Oracle Unit Test
Failures
I was assigned a task
to fix some problems with the nightly oracle unit tests. About 200 unit tests
had been failing because of sequence numbers being hard-coded into the unit
tests. My job was to figure out a way to reset the sequence numbers in Oracle
as part of the unit test setup. This way each unit test that was run would
start with a completely clean database, so we would not have to go into each
unit test and fix the hard-coded sequences. The unit test setup already cleaned
the database, but the sequences are not automatically cleared in an Oracle
database. Through my investigation into the problem I found two different ways
to reset the sequences:
DROP the sequence and
then CREATE it again
Change the way the
sequences are originally created in the database to include a MINVALUE. Then to
reset the sequences you can do the following:
SELECT the current value
Reset the sequence with the negative value of the current value as the
increment
SELECT nextval so that the negative increment takes effect
ALTER with +1 as the increment
I found that the best way to reset the
sequences was to drop them and then recreate them. This is because it is simpler
and doesn’t require changing the way the sequences are originally created,
which would require lots of regression testing to ensure nothing broke. I have
not finished writing the code or testing the code for this improvement yet but it
should be done early in June.
Tested New Driver
Check Mechanism
The final major thing
I did this month was test the new driver check feature. I wrote, executed and
demoed test cases that tested when a user would be contacted to download a
scanner driver. This increased my understanding of Passport and also refreshed
my test case writing ability from last summer. This also increased my knowledge
of HP Quality Center, which is where the test team writes and executes their test
cases. This assignment also taught me how to deploy builds on a WebSphere
environment, a skill I didn’t get to learn last summer. Learning to deploy
builds introduced me to a new tool, BeyondCompare, which helps when copying the
configurations from the old build over to the new build.
In June I am really
looking forward to completing the fixes for the Oracle Unit Test Failures as
well as regression testing the new driver check mechanism.
