Practices 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 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…
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Mutation Testing – Totally a Thing

Reposted from the original host Mutation Testing Mutation testing is a way to verify that your code is covered by tests. Oh? Go on… “What, like code coverage?” you may ask. Or, you may say “you want me to test my tests? That’s stupid. You’re stupid” which are not dissimilar from my reactions to mutation […]
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Six Keys to More Successful Projects through Visualization

Many companies are going through Agile transformations, however most struggle to achieve a lasting impact. Teams often struggle to gain clarity, improve accountability, or realize measurable progress. Traditional tools have failed and so has Agile. They appear to have all the right roles, ceremonies, artifacts, and tools, but something still isn’t quite right. Agile requires […]
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You Can’t Manage What You Can’t See

You know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. And you know what it means – pictures convey so much more about people or an idea you’re trying to describe than you could ever hope to with words. So why is it in knowledge work, that some of the most important information […]
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What’s the Deal with Kanban?

“What’s the Deal with Kanban?” is presented by Chris Shinkle, Director of Innovation at Software Engineering Professionals (SEP).
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Personal Meditations on Software

I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I haven’t gotten far, but I like the concept of “thoughts addressed to yourself”. So when I came across Sean Cassidy’s post on collecting reminders to himself, I decided to take 15 minutes and do the same. Some of this list is very personal, other items are widely applicable. […]
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6 Steps to Better Innovation

Chris Shinkle, Director of Innovation at Software Engineering Professionals (SEP), presents “6 Steps to Better Innovation”
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Builds should fail sometimes

Reposted from my personal blog “Well, you don’t want your builds to succeed all the time…” I remember hearing that for the first time a year or two ago and thinking to myself “that’s probably one of those counter-intuitive truths that make a lot of sense in the context of Agile. This guy is probably some kind […]
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Running Lean Startup Experiments Internally

When building a business or software, it is easy to make assumptions about what the market will want or how users will interact with your product. Recently, the concept of the Lean Startup Experiment has emerged to help us explicitly acknowledge these assumptions and construct small experiments to validate our assumptions. Here at SEP, we […]
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Striving to Be Replaceable

In the book, The Passionate Programmer, there’s a section about making sure you’re replaceable. Several of us here at SEP read that book during a book club. When my group first started this section we were taken aback. Finally, I think we teased apart two different ways of being replaceable. Bad Replaceable: Basically just be a cog in […]
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