OpenDaylight Intern Spotlight: Mohammad Zahraee

OpenDaylight has accepted seven student interns for the summer of 2014 to work in the community and receive hands-on development experience in SDN. Each intern is working closely with an active OpenDaylight developer as their mentor on a project that suits interest and community need. 

This blog series aims to showcase the interns chosen and the projects they’re actively working on, the mentors who are aiding in their professional development and the overall experience of working in an open source community to create a common platform for SDN and NFV.

I am a Master's student in computer science at the University of Paderborn. I got familiar with Software-Defined Networking (SDN), when I started to work as a student research assistant in the Network Research Group. We were developing Maxinet, a distributed version of Mininet, at that time. Maxinet can be used as a tool for SDN experiments on data centers. My mentors are Carol Sanders and Luis Gomez.

How did you hear about ​OpenDaylight and what got you interested in this internship?
I heard about a promising SDN controller, OpenDaylight, from one of my colleagues. And when I learned about the OpenDaylight Summer Intern Program and their projects, I did not hesitate to apply. I thought it would be a great opportunity to improve my skills and knowledge about SDN and also quality assurance (QA) in an open source project.

Can you talk about your experience working on an open source project? Any previous experiences you can share or key learnings from working on OpenDaylight?
I think the most valuable aspect of working in OpenDaylight is the world-class experience that one can gain by collaborating with professionals from companies such as HP, Brocade, Ericsson and developers from all around the world. It is a precious opportunity to learn, sharpen skills and grow. It can also be very helpful in learning project management and leadership. The intriguing part is that everyone can work on his/her interests, not to mention the joy of developing a tool that is going to be used by many other developers.

What is the best thing you’ve learned so far?
My work during the OpenDaylight Summer Intern Program consists of developing an extension for the Robot Framework, a generic test automation framework, that will pass test results to Testopia, a test case management tool. Before starting at OpenDaylight, all I knew about QA was theoretical. Now I have a far better insight into QA and continuous integration. Most importantly, it is in the context of SDN and it helped me to learn more about SDN, too.

Who are your mentors and what’s the experience been like so far?
People in the OpenDaylight community are very helpful and friendly. I should thank my mentors, Carol Sanders and Luis Gomez, who nicely elaborate requirements for me and guide me through the process.