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Writing a thesis work in cooperation with a company is relatively common in Sweden. On the one hand it means an opportunity to get valuable experience from the industry. On the other hand it usually means getting paid, which is always attractive for everyone who has ever been on a student budget. However, it is not that many of such works available, the competition can be really tough. Therefore, one needs to start looking for such opportunities well in advance. That was what I was doing in summer 2011. After a few fruitless email exchanges with different companies in Gothenburg I suddenly found myself in Lindholmen sitting in a short talk in the building near the river. The interview went quite well. However, I got two surprises:
- The start of the thesis work was planned in autumn 2011, not in spring 2012. Fortunately, I previously took a few extra courses and could replan my other studies.
- The thesis work was planned to be done by two students. I had to find someone to do it together. Fortunately, some of my classmates also took extra courses. One of them was ready (and happy) to join me.
What remained was just to speak to our programme manager at the university. He approved the thesis proposal and even agreed to become our supervisor. This was the starting point of the thesis work at Ericsson.
Getting familiar with the telecommunications industry can take a while. But the most important for us was knowing that mobile broadband modules could produce lots of logs with sensitive content. Visualization became the solution in helping software maintenance engineers without disclosing that sensitive content. The technical implementation of the complete prototype required some refresh of my skills in C# and Perl. For those who are interested into going even deeper into the subject I could suggest reading the student essay. What remains is to wish them a happy reading.
Yet another surprise during the thesis work was the decision to close down all further development in mobile broadband modules. The higher management saw stronger need for developers in other development units. Fortunately, the approach to visualization of logs turned out to be useful for other Ericsson products – it was just a question of adjusting some definitions in the logs. At the end of the thesis work my former colleagues ended up being widespread across other organizations within Ericsson.