SEP Alumni

I have been a Scrum Master for my team of 8-10 since November of 2011, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.  I was very lucky to land this position.  Previously I had done development and testing projects, but my only lead experience was for a team of myself […]

At SEP, we have very diverse teams, clients, and projects. With all of that variety and diversity, comes a lot of variation in how projects are run. Almost every project, in my experience, has used different processes and techniques. I was recently inspired by one of my coworkers, Jennifer, by a letter that she wrote […]

There is some friction between agile methodologies and the desire for upfront formal requirements that has really been bugging me lately. I often find myself wanting to have my cake and eat it too: I want clear and final requirements, but I don’t want to be forced to design an entire system upfront and drown […]

I have too many passwords.  I admit that I don’t always use a unique password on websites that I rate low on my ‘do I care if I get hacked’ radar.  And, unless forced, I’m terrible at remembering to change them from time to time.  On the plus side, I don’t keep passwords on post-it […]

This past Monday and Tuesday, I attended all-day training sessions led by David Hussman.  He’s a big Agile guy, but more than Agile he kind of picks and chooses the parts he believes work – i.e. he’s huge on TDD and pair programming and continuous integration.  Pointedly, he said if you don’t have the chops […]

How many people does it really take to ensure that code is correct?  I’m faced with a bit of a paradox.  On one hand, having ~20 people on a code review seems like overkill.  It has the potential to slow down reviews and create a bottleneck to getting anything done.  On the other hand, what […]

Automated UI testing can be tricky and is very easy to do wrong.  At SEP we’ve done several projects using TestComplete; it is a nice tool, but the early days were painful.  We made every mistake in the book, and learned our lessons the hard way.  These days, our TestComplete testing efforts are pretty slick.  […]

“Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.” – Cicero This is the basis of Plain Language.  The goal is to write documents (emails, web pages, manuals, proposals, etc) in an everyday language, without waffle, jargon, or ambiguity, so that the reader can easily find and understand the information […]

I was recently copied on an email thread where some requirements were discussed between a project lead (Bob) and the client (Fred). (FYI – the names are made up) Bob asked Fred about a specific requirement that read (paraphrased): The Error Indicator should display every 60 seconds. My next task was to add this indicator […]