In August 2018, I travelled all the way across the Atlantic to Logan, Utah, in order to do an internship at the relatively small, yet highly specialized company Juniper Systems Inc. Focusing on intuitive field computing solutions for rugged applications such as agriculture, Juniper Systems and its subsidiaries are responsible for the development of various industry-leading software applications such as Mirus or EmberEquine.
Complex software applications all have a couple of things in common – the most obvious being that they require a huge amount of testing. Countless workflows, options and user-interactions have to be validated before a new build can be released and declared as bug-free. As Juniper Systems’ software applications became increasingly more elaborate, the task of testing an application properly could no longer be completed manually. That’s when HarvestMaster, one of Juniper Systems’ subsidiaries, decided to implement automated software and application testing.
During my 4-week internship, I explored and evaluated various automated testing technologies such as Microsoft’s Coded UI framework or SmartBear’s TestComplete in order to find the solution that fits best to Juniper Systems’ needs and to their applications. This evaluation process included setting up test environments and automating tests with each automated testing technology to determine their compatibility and performance.
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Finally, I gathered the results of my evaluation in a feasibility study, where I compared the most promising candidates and listed their advantages and disadvantages. Based on the results of this feasibility study, the software manager of HarvestMaster decided that TestComplete was the best choice for his corporation, mainly since it promised to be the most time-saving, reducing the amount of time needed for testing by about ~20%.
The internship at Juniper Systems – or HarvestMaster – was a great opportunity to learn about automated software and application testing and the various technologies in this field. However, I am confident that I was able to take away much more than that from my four weeks in the US. Working in an intercultural environment was a great experience, and analyzing the market of automated testing technologies made me familiar with the very interesting area of market research.