
# SBS Internship

## What it is
Inbetween my time at University and Post-16 I took a gap year where I interned at Skipton Building Society as a software tester. This was a paid 9 month internship where I waspushed for automated testing
with SmartBears TestComplete system and worked with their API team to ensure their software remained stable whilst they slowly worked through all their API's transitioning them from TIBCO to Azure.

I was also asked to research Gherkin and Behaviour Driven Development to see if it would be worth transitioning to, helped to run a coding club to educate other members of the Society and later set-up
the Society's standards for all their future automated testing.

## What I did
I was initially hired to experiment with the idea of automating the Society's testing using SmartBear's TestComplete system. I taught myself a large portion of the tools over the course of a week
and then worked with one other collegue who came from a testing background to fully automate the UI testing of the Ds customer portal system.
From this we decided the tool may be worth using across the wider Society and worked with individual agile scrum teams to help them automate their testing. During this time I produced a presentation
on the inner workings of TestComplete and its benefits to the Society's senior developers convincing them of its worth. I also worked with my collegue to produce an educational talk, some tools and documentation
in order to educate other testers on the system and encourage widespread use.

After 3 months of working on TestComplete I was assigned to an Agile Hub in order to help them with their testing on the side whilst still working on TestComplete. This team was built to slowly
transition all of the societies APIs from TIBCO to Azure and my job was to ensure any software interacting with the API currently being replaced would still work when the team had finished. This was
done through large amounts of manual regression tests and a few automated tests where their work overlapped with my other TestComplete work. This was somewhat challenging for me to begin with as I had
little understanding of alot of the software I was testing and I found myself somewhat anxious when communicating with the team, however I slowly improved at this over time and ended up working with relative
efficiency. I did this through pushing myself to ask people questions and eventually reorganising my time by meeting with all the teams developers at the very start of an API development cycle to have a full
conversation with all of them on what needed to be tested and how rather than individually asking developers and having to compile the individual comments of each developer.

On the side of this I also ran a talk to teach testers the basics of javascript to increase the flexibility of their automated tests and later helped some lead developers to run a bi-weekly "Coding Club" to
educate testers on programming with C#. One of these lead developers also tasked me with researching into the testing language "Gherkin" and the concept of Behaviour Driven Development, I spent 2 months
experimenting with it on the side whilst doing my regular work and produced a presentation to them and a group of senior testers where I then facilitated more conversation on the viability of the system its
usefulness to the Society. I then organised regular meetings to continue the discussion.

## Skills Learnt
Throughout this internship I feel that my social skills developed greatly, I got alot better at giving critisism, being willing to ask questions and admit I didnt understand things and developed my self-confidence.
I also learnt a large amount about Microsoft's Azure Cloud Systems and manual and automated testing. I also gained real experience of an Agile working environment which I greatly enjoyed and I developed a much
stronger understanding of APIs and back-end programming which I had never previously looked into.

Multiple times during my work there I was requested to stay as an apprentice rather than go to University, I did turn this offer down but I intend to work for them over summers and during my industry year at
University as I found it an incredibly friendly and safe feeling place with a really healthy culture. Their attitude towards change was very exciting to work in and multiple times I found I would make a mistake
and be worried my teams would be annoyed or upset only to find they wouldnt even consider it an issue and with zero negative responses they would just ask how they could help to fix it and help me plan a solution.

