Cédric Hulin

Implementation of a critical solution for global media campaign planning and tracking.

Realigning team practices and product to help the organization identify and adopt the most efficient and profitable renewable energy technologies.

By strengthening a team composed of four developers and a product owner, we took control of an existing software. This software, highly complex, unstable, and over-engineered, was misaligned with business needs, making it difficult to understand and evolve.

We successfully tackled major performance and stability challenges, particularly in managing a considerable volume of time-series data from providers with heterogeneous technologies.

All this was achieved while maintaining the team's production capacity.

To assist the team, several actions were taken:

- Simplification and Realignment: Redesigned the software architecture to make it more modular and aligned with business needs, facilitating understanding and evolution.

- Performance Optimization: Implemented solutions to improve performance and stability by optimizing the management of large datasets.

- Testing: Established a testing strategy, including automated tests, to ensure software reliability and quality at each deployment stage.

- Improvement of Team Practices: Created and led a community of practice around Software Craftsmanship and good development practices.

Technically, the product consists of:

- Multiple ASP.NET 8 Web APIs written in C# and hosted on Azure;

- Two SPAs in Vue 3 with Pinia;

- A set of Azure Functions to trigger acquisitions;

- Azure Service Bus for asynchronous choreography;

- InfluxDb databases for time-series storage and processing;

- Several Azure PostgreSQL databases;

- GitHub CI/CD pipelines (as code).

Took over and redeveloped a product for studying and reducing the energy consumption and environmental impact of tenants in a connected building.

Our team consisted of a front-end developer, a Product Owner, and myself. Our goal was to revive this product and restore stakeholder confidence after four years of turnover. This complex and poorly documented legacy had never been launched.

We had to restructure and stabilize the product for the launch of a behavioral study and to incorporate new features, making it user-friendly and valuable for tenants and researchers.

To achieve this objective, several key actions were taken:

- Legacy Archaeology: Excavated and interviewed to understand the existing system without making assumptions, thus building a solid documentation base to begin the work of taking over and simplifying the system.

- Testing Strategy: Implemented a testing harness to modify the project structure without impacting business behaviors and created the first set of living documentation modules.

- Continuous Delivery: Established Continuous Delivery processes and practices to ensure regular deliveries and regain the trust of users and sponsors.

- Vertical Architecture: Adopted development around use cases, simplifying the solution, improving code quality and business expression, and enabling the delivery of a sustainable product.

Technically, the product consists of:

- An ASP.NET 8 Web API written in C# and hosted in Azure;

- An Angular 13 SPA with Nx & NgRx for tenants;

- A Vue 3 SPA with Pinia for researchers;

- WebJobs and Azure Logic Apps;

- GitHub CI/CD pipelines (as code);

- Azure AD B2C authentication flows;

- An Azure Function for AD roles and permissions;

- An Azure PostgreSQL database.