Work Term Update-January 2016

Development Environment Setup

My work term began with setting up my development environment. This work term I worked both on the passport web application and the commercial mobile deposit (CMD) mobile application. It was a nice challenge setting up my development environment for CMD. CMD consists of a server and a client. The server is written in Java and the client is written in angular JS.

Story Planning

During the month of January I also participated in Story Planning for the next release. It was very interesting starting a coop term at the begining of a release instead of coming in during the middle of the release. I really gained an appreciation for how much planning goes into the release. We created the stories and then sized them using story points.

Work Term Update-May 2014

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.