SDP

SDP - Scalable Development Plan - was an internal tool developed within RLE International that brought together the various automotive process knowledge that the company had gathered over years of work with various OEMs.

It was a web application that gathered project inputs from users and could then calculate a full project timing plan, split across various swimlanes for the given project details. After this, users could further update the plan within the tool to fully align it to their own expectations or export the data for using in external tools such as Microsoft Project.

I was involved in collating the data and architecting a method of storing it. I gathered the data by conducting interviews with technical specialists and mapping their defined process into whiteboard drawings which I later exported into Excel in a custom built file with VBA scripts to support the large datasets. The scripts also processed the data into an SQL database, ready to be consumed by the Java code into Neo4j for the calculation algorithms.

I was fully in charge of the SQL backend database, meaning I had to learn how to write SQL queries. I optimised this by storing the data that we collected day to day in Excel and then writing a VBA script to automate creating the SQL queries to update the database quickly.

This lead to a complete rebuild when our company migrated from Microsoft to Google, meaning I had to migrate the data and automations into Google Sheets and use Google Apps Script.

There was a brief period where we began consider rebuilding the frontend in React and as such, I was involved in discussing the requirements and helping with the interview process, although the development of this stopped relatively quickly when the whole project was scaled back.

As well as the main app, we also developed several NeoDash dashboards off of the Neo4j data for ongoing maintenance to check on the data, teaching me about this tool and getting me further involved with writing Cypher queries.

We also managed a GitLab Kanban board for feature ideas and tickets, giving me my first insight into User Stories and bug ticketing.