The end of my second week at QA consisted of a project where I had to create a virtual machine using Vagrant. I had to configure the vagrantfile so that the virtual machine would automaticall install various programs. These programs included ones such as Java, Maven, Git, Jenkins, and Jira. It was fairly simple to set up the first four programs. Java and Maven simply needed the source file to be in the same directory as the vagrantfile, Git was downloaded and installed, and Jenkins was unpacked into a folder and ran from there. To allow the user to access Jenkins, I then had a line of code that copied the password to the desktop into a file that the user could then open and copy from. Jira first needed to be installed manually, then it created a file that recorded which options were chosen for installation. Using this file, I was then able to edit a few lines of code to enable the virtual machine to automatically install Jira using the settings that I had used previously. The file that it had generated needed to be placed in the same directory as the vagrantfile.

Although this was the main task of the project, there was also a bonus task of linking together Git, Jenkins, and Jira so that they would work together automatically. I was able to configure downloads for the plugins that would allow Jenkins to interact with the other two programs, but found it a bit more difficult to find ways to connect Git and Jira to each other, and back to Jenkins. I believe I would have needed to figure out a method to control a web browser in order to complete those final tasks. Unfortunately I did not have enough time to figure out how to complete this task, which is a shame, as I could have then set up Jenkins without the need to copy the password to the desktop.

The third and fourth weeks consisted of learning about Enterprise Architecture (EA). This consisted of creating many different types of documents, and going through various activities. This work was completed in groups. The aim of the course was to create an EA for a fictional company. To start with, we had interviews with some of the higher ups in the company, to figure out what was going wrong. We then moved on to interviewing members lower down, in order to gain more specific details that the more senior members did not know. Some of the documents that we created were a Business Model Canvass, a Terms of Reference, some Business Process Model and Notation diagrams, and a few others.

I unfortunately fell ill and missed the first half of the second week of EA, although this consisted of activities such as making and holding a workshop, creating User Stories and Use Cases, which are methods of explaining what goes on in a process, and various other tasks. The second half of this week ended with each team giving a presentation on what they had done, and a test on the EA course that we had just undergone.

At the end of the third week at QA, we were able to choose what specification we would like to go into, with the choices of Cloud, Mulesoft, DevOps, and Pega. As I had enjoyed learning about it previously, and it seemed the most interesting, I decided to choose DevOps. I believe we are to find out at the end of the fourth week or the beginning of the fifth in whether or not we were able to follow the path we would have liked to.