Agile Articles

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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One Small Step Toward TDD, One Small Leap for SEP

One small Step Toward TDD I have been reading about TDD and unit testing for about 7 years now and have not fully adopted TDD. It has a ton of time tested benefits including writing less production code, writing simpler code, making your code easier to change, making your code easier to test and the […]
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Embracing Change: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Chuck My Daily Plans

First, some background. I’m working primarily on a time and materials project, focused on handling whatever problems may crop up that are currently high priority to our client contacts – either for the introduction of new features, fire-fighting or bug squashing. From time to time, something big enough will spontaneously combust, and I’ll be forced […]
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Developing Habits: Visualizing Daily Work

In a blog battle post earlier this week, I linked to a fairly old Lifehacker post on Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret – a simple means to visualize/motivate daily action on a specific type. Using a calendar, or a grid you can track the number of days you’ve completed your goal and, more importantly, the number of […]
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When the Pizza Guy Delivers Chinese

Chris Shinkle’s seminar titled, “When the Pizza Guy Delivers Chinese: Seeing Value Through the Customer’s Eyes” at LeanSSC’11. This talk will show how to be successful by identifying business value and by focusing on enhancing it. As well as showing specific practices that help elicit and understand value as defined by the customer.
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Lean or Kanban Will Not Save Us From Ourselves

Lean or Kanban will not save us from ourselves.  By themselves, they will not prevent us from producing software that does not deliver value to the end customer. SEP has spent the better part of 20 years getting good at software development.  Throughout those 20 years, SEP has sought to improve or methods and processes. […]
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Story Mapping – Getting Started

In our recent training, Jeff Patton presented a structured discovery process centered around the story map and personas, neatly packaged into about a week of time. Some people in the training were worried that their clients wouldn’t be willing to commit this. Let’s tackle this from two angles: how to get a client to the […]
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Story Mapping

We recently completed several days of training with the fabulous Jeff Patton. At a 10,000 foot level, the techniques he talked about focus on getting the whole story on a project you are considering doing. Most agile and lean techniques are all about building better software faster, rather than building the right software. This is […]
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Usability, and more…

Last week, we had 3 days of training.  Jeff Patton came in to talk to us about usability, and how to work with our clients to make sure we produce something they actually need.  He introduced ideas and concepts that weren’t entirely new…he simply put the ideas and concepts together in a process that makes […]
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My Agile 2010 Sessions

I’ve submitted 2 proposals for sessions at the Agile 2010 conference. They can be previewed here: https://agile2010.agilealliance.org/node/6079 https://agile2010.agilealliance.org/node/6250 You have to create an account to view them. But, once you do, you can leave comments and browse other Agile 2010 session proposals. Let me know what you think!
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