Application to Automate Test Reports

NIAR was my first exposure to development within an engineering environment. I had been hired on by the environmental testing lab whose responsibility was to test various aircraft components against a number of electrical and mechanical environmental conditions. Once those tests were completed, a report was created detailing the components performance during each tests. This report was quite large, containing numerical data and photographs. Creating this report manually could take an engineer several weeks to accurately compile, lable, and format.

As the only computer science student, in a laboratory full of Electrical and Mechanical enginneers, it was my task to develop an application to automate this process. This would be the first project I would work on intended to be utilized by others on a regular basis. However, with an absense of software development expertise in the lab, and my being fairly early in my degree, the project proceeded without a convential structure or well defined development cycle. Many of the approaches taken to develop this application would later serve to reinforce the importance of certain workflows I would later be introduced to. For example, I would not be introduced to Git (Or any version control, for that matter) until after I finished this project but, because of the experiences I had trying to manage different versions of the application manually, I immedietly recognized the value of Git and made additional effort to become proficient with it.

Looking back at it with all of the additional knowledge that my experiences have afforded I recognize that the scope of the project may have been a bit larger than what I would have expected a second year CS student to undertake alone. However, the project did ultimately produce an application that the engineers of the lab used regularly and that aided in reducing the time reports took to create drastically. Though it most certainly was not without its faults, A year after my departure from NIAR I would find out that it remained in use.