Hawaiian Airlines QA Engineer

In the summer of 2019, I had the great opportunity to intern at Hawaiian Airlines as a software quality assurance engineer. The role of a QA engineer is to make sure the software and code performs as they intend to do. We test them extensively and review the business requirements for the software. They are involved in planning and implementing strategies for quality management and testing.

The project that I was put on for this internship was testing a revised webpage that Hawaiian Airlines was designing. They were in the process of designing a new web page for the flight status page to make it more user friendly and to add more features to the page. First, I had to go over the work plan and all of the requirements that had to be met in order for this webpage to go out in public. This involved countless meetings with different departments and filling out a (very) long, detailed work plan on the scope of the project, what was changing, who would be utilizing the webpage, and etc.

After that was done, it was a bunch of agile meetings that I had to attend to get the project starting. Agile meetings are a common practice in software development jobs because they increase the productivity of the team and organize the tasks on who should do what. Agile meetings involve sprint planning in which the team devises a work schedule on the project and assigns who will take on which task. Throughout the progress, the team will set mini deadlines and hold daily standup meetings to check in on everyone’s progress.

Throughout this project, I had to learn how to use Selenium Webdriver. Selenium Webdriver is a collection of APIs that are used to specifically test web applications. I used the webdriver to test to see if the user interface of the flight status page was correct. Using Selenium, I was able to create many automated test cases that navigated through the flight status page and verified that it landed on the correct page. A challenge that I encountered during this project was learning my way through the Hawaiian Airlines UI framework that they developed specifically for UI testing. At first, I was very overwhelmed because there was a lot of information that I had to process and I felt lost at one point. But by setting up meetings with my coworkers, I was able to fully understand how their framework works and how they incorporated Selenium. I honestly had a lot of fun with this internship because not only did I learn a lot about how enterprise IT worked, I gained a lot of lifelong companions and connections that I am grateful for.

You can view the new flight status page here.