A three-week school internship in the SWK working group

9 February 2024, by Prof. André van Hoorn

Levi Schnorr was so kind to write a short report about his school internship in our working group:

My Three-Week School Internship in the Field of Software Engineering

During my three-week school internship from January to February 2024 in the SWK research group under the friendly supervision of Professor André van Hoorn, I gained many insights into the work at the university. My main task was to develop a server plugin for the video game „Minecraft“. The plugin allows playing the well-known game "Tic-Tac-Toe" in two and three dimensions against other players. I was supposed to apply various software engineering practices.

First, I wrote down the requirements for the plugin using the Arc42 template. For the plugin, I used the build system "Maven". I created a repository on GitHub (https://github.com/lscgh/TicTacToePlugin), where I also set up so-called "GitHub Actions" (a CI/CD pipeline), which creates a release with the built plugin every time a change is pushed to the repository. I created a class diagram with UML to plan the plugin's structure in advance.

Then, I started the implementation in Java and created tests with JUnit for the plugin's different functions. Finally, I revised the code to improve readability and created an overview for the plugin.

Moreover, I had the opportunity to attend various lectures, listen to two presentations in the SWK research seminar, and look at the exercises for software development.

Overall, I learned a lot of exciting things about the professional planning and development of software during the internship.