Hoi Chan – Developer
Hi, my name’s Hoi.  I worked as a 3 month summer intern at the Chalfont office as a software engineer.  Before starting my internship with Citrix I completed my third year of a four year masters degree in Computer Science at The University of Warwick.

I found out about the internship when Citrix visited one of my university’s careers fairs.  From the short time I spent at the onsite interview I really liked what I saw and I felt a sense of warmth and friendliness amongst the staff or “Citrites”.  As much as I was trying to give a good first impression, it seemed that Citrix was making an equal effort towards me.

The work I carried out during the summer was part of the porting effort of one of the products, Citrix Presentation Server, to the Windows Server 2008 platform. Specifically, I worked on a component which is used by server administrators to monitor the performance of the server from the point of view of an end user.  This is essentially the engine behind the plug-in product Citrix EdgeSight.

Part of my time was spent learning how to use a mix of programming languages including C, C++ and C#.  This was a bit different to my strong Java background but I was given all the help support needed.  That help and support wasn’t limited to programming either; anything I needed help with or didn’t understand I could just ask and someone was always willing.  That includes questions about what Citrix does and how to use their products – I didn’t have a clue!

Working for such a large company gives you experience you simply can’t get at university.  It’s incredible seeing the size and number of projects going at the same time, the way that all the different teams work together and the tools they use to help get the job done.  However, working on a large product under development does also mean that a lot of it doesn’t work how it should.  This meant that I did spend a lot of time fighting to find a working build and to figure out various workarounds to get the bits I want to work – but that’s all part of the experience.

One of the great things about working with Citrix is the flexibility they offer.  As long as you get your work done and put in the hours you’re not usually expected to turn up at any specific times - great for missing the rush hour traffic.  In fact, sometimes you don’t necessarily even have to turn up because you can work remotely from home.  That’s the great thing about working for a company who make remote application deployment technologies!

Bruce Cullen – System 1 test engineer
Hi I’m Bruce Cullen. I’m a 21 year old IT student from UCE Birmingham and am working in Matt Strains System 1 Test team in Chalfont.

From my department title “Test” you would assume I have been working on testing. While this is partly true I have been working more on an RTST server farm. Let’s look at exactly what this means/is. RTST Stands for Real Time Stress Test and an RTST system is not to push a system to its limits but to test how it handles under a production level load.

As a company Citrix has 3 test departments that are all closely linked. System 1 is my department. It focuses on functionality testing i.e. do the features of the product being tested meet the specification and work. System 2 deals with stress testing the product being tested to see how it handles under high loads. Finally system 3 focuses on compatibility with products from other companies.

What my department actually does largely depends on what project is on at the time. The department will do everything from creating test cases (a specification on what tests are to be carried out, how and on what part of the application being tested) to testing each feature. During my time in Citrix the system 1 the department was mainly testing a new version of CDS (Citrix desktop server) so this is primarily what the RTST system was developed to test and what my/the departments work was based around.

How did I become a test engineer?
My university has a work placements website on which yearlong work placements are listed for students looking to make their course a sandwich course to apply to. I had been on this site many times and had applied to several places for year placements. One of the placements applied for was a yearlong placement at Citrix. After about a month or so of applying for placements on this site I had decided as I had already got some IT experience from working in IT support from before university taking a whole year out of university may not be the best use of time. It was around this time I got a call from Citrix to ask if I was interested in a telephone interview. I accepted as I thought there was no harm in applying.
The telephone interview came and at the beginning of the call I was asked if I was interested in a 12 month or 3 month placement within the company. Before this time I was not aware 3 month placements had existed. I asked to be considered for the 3 month placement.
I got through 2 phone interviews and a face to face interview involving logic tests and technical tests and was offered the job. I happily accepted.

What Skills would I need to become a test engineer?
Personally speaking in order to do a test engineers job several qualities are useful:

• Not being frightened that you are going to break the product you are testing.  If you break the product you are doing well as you have found a fault!
• Communication skills – if you find a bug ask around to see if anyone else has found the same thing. If so was there a fix? Also if you are not sure of anything ask or you could find you have been working in the wrong direction
• The ability to complete tasks with only a broad specification – if you are given a task you should be self sufficient enough to complete it without having to ask too many “should I do it like this?” kind of questions.
• Good knowledge of the product you are testing/the core technologies surrounding the product – this goes without saying although much of this can be picked up while on the job by lots of reading. Before I joined Citrix I knew very little about Citrix and its products.
• Troubleshooting – If an installer for example isn’t working as it should before logging it as a bug try and find out why it is not working as expected. Ask around to see if others have been having similar experiences. If you need to log the issue as a bug, troubleshooting info and steps tried are always useful
• Flexibility – there will be times when working to a deadline you need to pull out all the stops to get it finished on time.

What doing this job has done for me
Before coming to Citrix I knew very little about server based computing, Citrix and Citrix’s products. I now know a lot more about all of this.

I have also gained much valuable experience in testing and testing processes in general. Skills such as this cannot be taught academically and can/should only be learnt on the job.

An extra area I was not expecting to learn about was virtualisation. Before my job here I had only herd of virtualisation products such as VMware and Xen but as both of these where used in my day to day job I found out much about them and how they work.

Finally before I leave to return to complete my final year of university I am to take my CCA in Presentation server 4.5 – a professional IT qualification recognised worldwide. Getting this qualification will add an extra string to my bow so to speak and make me more marketable to employers after university.