Industrial Placement at Borg Warner

Introduction

Between September 2017 to July 2018 I carried out an industrial placement as a Student Software Engineer at BorgWarner (formly Sevcon), a company focused on electric vehicle technology. During my placement I worked on a range of tools and software for both internal use to aid development along with features included in the actual customer products.

Main Work Completed

• Security Module: Written with a combination of C and Java, I was responsible for the development of the immobiliser security module for one of the company’s biggest customers in the latest version of the product. I begun development from the customer’s formal specification of their requirements, writing and testing the module individually and its integration with the hardware by myself. Testing was done both manually and with learning automating tools. I helped demonstrate the security module’s functionality to the customer over call with the project leader, and overall the customer was very happy with the result. I wrote and maintained full documentation for the structure, use and debugging of the security module for reference at the end of my placement.
• User Code: I aided development of BorgWarner’s ability to offer custom functionality to customers by working on developing this ‘sandbox’ Java code’s API with its team.
• Development Modules: I once again went through the full software development cycle to include two modules within my team’s main product that aided us in development by providing information about the current state of the system during hardware testing, one to record and display alerts and one for investigating current memory.
• Release Testing: I was part of the team responsible for the final testing of a crucial product in order to approve it for release. Together we carried out numerous repeats of our testing cycle as we identified possible issues and fixed or improved them, using diagonistic tools to test both hardware and software qualities.

What Was Learnt

This placement was the longest amount of time I had spent working in the computer science industry, and I was able to develop and hone many professional skills during it. Going through different stages of the software development cycle numerous times, and sometimes from start to finish, by myself or within the team was very insightful for an understanding of how work is completed in the industry. I also felt the benefits of working in a team to solve issues and develop a high quality product, improving team communication skills through sharing of knowledge and daily meetings to exchange progress and bring up issues.

TICE Explore Day

During my placement I assisted two other members of my team in their work as ambassadors for This Is Creative Enterprise, taking part in the running of a two day programme intended to introduce four secondary school classes to Computer Science at an industrial and academic level. On the industrial day I helped in making sure the day’s event ran smoothly and that each class reached the correct locations on time. My main work came on the academic day. I gave two presentations introducing the content of a Computer Science course and life at Newcastle University, and also acted as a demonstrator during the games development masterclass, seeing to students who needed help as they worked through creating a JavaScript version of Breakout. This day taught me lots about communication and teaching of ideas in helping others with code.

An article about the day can be found here.