Computer Science and Software Engineering Capstone Presentations
Fall Quarter
December 18, 2020
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Garima Maheshwari "Improving
Health Care Amidst a Pandemic" (Premera Blue Cross) Faculty Advisor: Dr. Yusuf Pisan |
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Abstract For my capstone this past summer, I had the
opportunity to work at Premera Blue Cross as a
Software Developing Intern. Premera Blue Cross is one
of the biggest healthcare providers in Washington State and strives to
improve the lives of their customers, by making healthcare work better.
Amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, they continue to work towards this mission.
During this internship, I was part of a scrum team on the Custom Data
Exchange team, that develops backend services in order to
automate the processing of crucial customer data such as health claims. Along
with assisting the scrum team in completing product backlog items, attending
mobbing sessions, and shadowing the different roles within the team, I also
simultaneously worked on a project. In this project, I was tasked to redesign and
refactor a customer payment data file processing program from Visual Basic
into C#. Some of the areas of improvement for this program that my team
wanted me to focus on, included refactoring it into C# in
order to utilize the packages and efficiencies available. I was also
asked to implement a solution to a constraint that only allowed the program
to process one input file with a single time and date stamp. The most
important area of improvement was designing the program to make it more
maintainable for easier future development. I went through the iterative development process
from redesigning to deployment, so that I could address all the opportunities
for improvement. Before redesigning, I learned about Premera's
different environments including the way customer data was organized,
secured, and transferred. In addition to that, I focused on learning about
tools such as Azure DevOps, UDeploy, Beyond
Compare, and Visual Studio in order to aid me when I
would later implement and test the program. Later, when redesigning the
program, I used OOP techniques and C# packages available such as Log4Net to
write code that was modular and easy to debug. I shadowed test and software
engineers on the team to understand how integration testing worked while
deploying code to Premera's various test
environments. After successful testing, this program now runs in Premera's production environment where it processes
payment files almost every day. This internship not only allowed me to work
on something that was meaningful, but also gave me the opportunity to
integrate myself into the agile environment at Premera. |
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Updated December 15, 2020