Varuna talks about his internship

Q: So you’ve been working with us for 6 months now, and have worked on many projects, what do you think of your internship?

A: I joined SilverStripers as an Intern student, and worked as a QA tester. The best thing for me was that I was really working from my first day. I worked on testing booking systems. My job was to ensure the software’s quality. Simply what I had to do is to make testing materials, use auto mated testing, design test cases / test plans and ensure the software is fulfilling the requirements throughout the development life cycle.
I believe that I gained an extensive amount of experiences and knowledge in my six months internship in the company.
The company is an ideal place for young software developers of interns to start with. The projects were interesting, correct direction was given all the time, the senior developers always knew what they were talking about, and got us involved in to projects.

Q: How was it for you to work with the senior developers in the company?

A: They were always helpful. They always had answers for me when I am stuck with anything, and they promptly guided me to complete my tasks. For me the guidance they gave was the reason that my internship was a success.

Q: What were you involved in doing and how did you like your work?

A: Hmmm…. Let me explain you what my responsibilities are

1. I had to analyze business requirement documents and develop test plans and test case documents
2. Design test cases and write auto test scripts using the in-house automated testing framework and Selenium IDE.
3. System testing, functional testing, regression testing, unit testing and performance testing
4. Prepare test reports based on the test results
5. Providing feedback and recommendations to developers on software usability.

So I loved working on these. It was not easy, involved a lot of reading, going through discussions etc., but still that’s good work and looking back I’ve done a tremendous amount of work.
One thing to say, finding bugs was the coolest thing for me, and getting them fixed was ice cold.

Q: Was it a good learning experience?

A: Yes Indeed! This was the first time I really worked in an office in my life. Other than work there were lots of learn opportunities. Like how to work with a team, how to work with seniors, writing reports, presenting something, office attire, how to communicate etc.
On top of all these I learnt what responsibility really is and I gained confidence in myself in software quality assurance.

Q: There is a good possibility that we will employee more interns next year from UCSC, anything you want to add on that? Do you think there are areas that we could have helped you more?

A: That's great!
I think it will be nice to have some sort of an orientation program on the first day. I believe that will be good for the new interns to settle down. Things like the work culture, organizational structure, facilities, a brief about the projects and the about the team.

So thank you very much Varuna, this was the first time we hired intern students to work with us and we too had to learn a lot. Varuna is more likely joining the company once he completes his degree in Information and Communication Technology.
We wish you all the best and hope we will work together again.
Thank you very much.