Computer Science and Software Engineering Capstone Presentations
Fall Quarter
December 18, 2020
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Angela Capera "Liberty
Mutual Tech Start Internship" (Liberty Mutual) Faculty Advisor: Dr. Yusuf Pisan |
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Abstract As part of my capstone, I joined the Global Retail
Market Products and Underwriting team at Liberty Mutual. The role of my
squad, as teams are referred to in Liberty Mutual, was to
modernize legacy Java code and to develop projects resulting in cost-saving
for the Liberty Mutual brand. This squad uses microservices to
integrate vendors and modernize legacy code written in Java 1.4 and 1.6. As a
squad member, I joined the scrum meetings, developed and
tested code in the test server, used Postman to hit APIs end-points, and pair programmed with each team member when possible. When
I joined the team, their priority was to support a recently rolled out
project related to the implementation of a new vendor
through a microservice. The project was going to progressively be rolled out
to different states in the U.S. each month for the next six
months. Additionally, they were about to start working on a new, big project
related to an improved home insurance rating system and code
updates. In the first part of my internship, I pair programmed with my
teammates, attempting to pair program with a different teammate
each time, allowing me to learn from them and their working style. I learned
about the team dynamics, the different projects, the
coding practices, the testing tools, and the vendors the team worked with. I
closely followed each code change, making sure to ask why
the change, and if I could test the changes in any way. After a period of intense learning, I was able to
contribute to the team by testing the project scheduled to be rolled out in
September, keeping track of the vendors our software called
with the Service Call Recorder (SCR) and hitting API end-points with Postman.
One of the bugs I encountered in the production software was in
the application used by the Liberty agents. The application was throwing a city
validation error on some valid city names. After
debugging, I found out that the validating regular expression used for the
field does not take leading blank spaces. I also found out the
input for that field was not being trimmed before verification. Therefore, I implemented code assuring to trim the input
information, helping to keep consistency between the validated input and the
information saved in the database. During my last couple of
weeks, I had the opportunity to demo an improvement done to an error message,
meant to help the vendor debug errors on their side. In addition to the technical skills, I've learned, I
also expanded my knowledge about the Software Engineering industry. I applied
my knowledge in agile development, got a deeper
understanding of how sprints work, I worked with experienced developers and
became more curious about tech areas and skills I want to explore further. |
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Updated December 15, 2020