Google Testing Blog: Abdul's Summer Intern Testimonial

Abdul's Summer Intern Testimonial

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Posted by Patrick Copeland, Test Engineering Director

With intern season coming to a close, we wanted to share a testimonial from one of the 90 interns who joined us in Test Engineering this summer. This one is from a Software Engineer in Test who worked in the NYC office on the "blog search" project...Interning as a Software Engineering Tester for Google was certainly an experience I won't forget. It started three weeks before the end of my summer break, when I received an email from a recruiter in Google's New York City office requesting an interview for a Fall internship position. I had not planned for this, but I figured I would give it a shot! Three weeks and a few interviews later, I was in New York City, apartment-shopping for my internship, which started the following week! Having never worked in test engineering before, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. All I knew was Google works fast! I hoped I could keep up.

The first couple of weeks at Google required the most adjustment. While diving into my project's code and "Noogler" (new Googler) training courses, I came to the realization that this was going to be one of the most challenging experiences of my life. In the past, I've always associated challenging experiences with stress. But this was beginning to feel quite the opposite. Everyone around me was incredibly helpful, and the facilities were so comfortable that I actually found myself enjoying the challenge to the point of not wanting to leave work. The opportunity to learn at Google is literally endless, and I couldn't get enough.

The great thing about test engineering is the ability to pick the challenges you want to attack. You get to find problems and attack code from angles that you never thought of before. The more you work and the more you test, the more you find out the RIGHT way of doing things, and just when you think you've got it perfect, you find a new way of optimizing your project's code. The product is as good as your testing proves it to be, and in a sense you become the gatekeeper for a product that is being used by millions worldwide. Having that responsibility is an amazing feeling.

There were many projects available for me to work on at Google. From a test engineer's standpoint, there is always room for improvement in any product. I started my internship working on the back-end crawling and indexing components of Blog Search. After a few weeks of studying RSS technology and looking through Blog Search's parsing and indexing approach, the testing team and I were able to formulate a formal test plan that addressed potential security vulnerabilities and potential avenues for failure in many special case scenarios. Our code analysis and test cases will be constantly revisited and extended at every code change and will be the basis of many design decisions through the life of Blog Search. As my internship continued, I had the opportunity to work on several other projects, from small, new projects to larger, more established ones. I personally preferred the newer projects. I enjoy being involved from the beginning and being able to sit side-by-side with project managers and technical leads and give feedback about issues in the latest development.

What's really fun is that every week, the entire NYC test engineering team gets together to sync up, share ideas, communicate issues, and share the latest news. This is where some of the great ideas get drawn up, and when something good hits the table, we pick it up and run with it! In my last few weeks at Google, we were able to draw a correlation between some common issues that we were all facing and identify the underlying challenges that needed to be addressed. Immediately, we started work on an automated testing framework that would solve most of our problems. When finished, it will be used not only by us, but possibly by every project team within Google.

Overall, working at Google was a great experience. I had my share of fun, and I learned a great deal and am very grateful for the experience.