Mike's Blog

Internship Progression

I have now completed the first 8 days of my internship at LabOne in the IT/QC Department. Thusfar, I feel as though I have not accomplished much, however, looking back over my completed tasks outline reveals that I have done quite a lot of various tasks. My primary assignment to date has been to design a database which will function as a repository for test cases. These test cases are used by the QC Department to test the various software products which are created and maintained by the LabOne IT staff for use by both internal and external clients. There are approximately 30 software products - with a major rewrite of the Substance Abuse Testing Laboratory Information System being conducted at present. I have spent the majority of the first 8 days of my internship in:

• Planning meetings over the basic database structure and functionality
• Small group meetings to discover useability issues with the staff
• Prototype table design for the database
• Studying and learning the LSDM (that is the LabOne Systems Development Methodology)
• Drafting the Technical Design and Project Proposal documents for the assigned database, in accordance with the guidelines set forth in the LSDM.
• Researching proposed testing tools for use with Oracle forms/applications. The tools are utPLSQL and Ounit.

Over the next week I will begin constructing a small-scale prototype (or model, if you will) of the QC Test Case Database (this is my informal title for the application). I also hope to meet with a few members of the IT application development staff in order to "pick their brains" on how to best create this application using MS Access 97. I would prefer to use Access 2003, however, this has not been installed on all of the computers used by the QC staff. Another projected task to work on during week 2 is designing a rough user-interface for accessing the database via the LabOne intranet, also known as The Source.