Software Engineering at Dematic
Adam
Experience Information
Employer: Dematic
Job Title: Software Engineer
Major: Computer Engineering
Received Credit: Yes
Paid: Yes
Abroad: No
Description of the Organization
"Dematic designs, develops and delivers solutions that optimize your supply chain, improve performance and increase productivity. We understand your business economic drivers and are in sync with today's constantly changing market trends. Our industry leading software and automation technologies will allow your organization to be responsive to customer demands, labor challenges and asset and space utilization requirements. With more than 75 years of robust design and delivery experience, Dematic solutions will strengthen and enhance your supply chain and catapult your organization forward." - From dematic.com/en-US
Description of the Tasks/Projects Completed
At Dematic I worked in the software research and development department where we worked on a software suite that provides the high-level control over our physical systems installed at our job sites (usually distribution centers/automated warehouses). Basically this means that in the order fulfillment process, the customer's system downloads orders to ours and our system then handles fulfilling those orders by optimizing the process of people picking the items in those orders, packing them and shipping them. In our department there are several teams focusing on different portions of the software suite, mine being the system integration team. We focus on providing and maintaining both the framework with which we write our system level tests and the system level tests themselves. The other teams in the department are individually responsible for writing the applications themselves, unit tests (tests that probe segments of an application) and module level tests (tests that require a running version of that application but do not require the presence of other applications). Throughout this semester, I worked with my team on writing system level tests, working through bugs uncovered by these tests with our other teams, and developing a better framework within which we write our system level tests.
Skills/Knowledge Gained Through The Experience
In addition to the skills obtained through my previous two co-op rotations in the same department, I increased my proficiency in Python, SQL, and general software architecture design practices.
Favorite Part of the Experience
My favorite part of this past semester's co-op was my opportunity to work with another developer to design and code from the ground up a new framework within which we write our integration tests. We sought to solve problems and hindrances present in previous integration test architectures, providing a framework where functionality was modularized and a minimal amount of code was copied and pasted between different test cases.
How the Experience Influenced Future Career Goals
I have enjoyed this co-op rotation immensely, and it has further confirmed that the field of software engineering is the field in which I desire to build my career.