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 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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Deadline-Driven Development

Deadlines. We’ve all run into them. We might be talking about a project at work or filing our taxes each year. But deadlines usually get a bad rap. Everyone loves to complain about deadlines. But I like them. What? Why in the world would I like deadlines? Because they help remind me to ask questions. […]
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My Ideal Software Project: 7 Values I Believe In…

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 […]
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Why should I care what my code looks like?

Someone said to me recently “I don’t care what the code looks like, as long as it works.” This offended me because I take pride in making my code look nice and easy to read. Plus it makes me happy to develop clean code. But why should you care? I was on a project that […]
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Been There, Done That

“Been there, done that” is a dangerous phrase in software engineering. I recently watched Ben Orenstein’s talk “Refactoring From Good to Great“, and it got me thinking about how easy it is to become complacent with your code, design patterns, and solutions.  If “been there, done that” is your attitude toward the problems you’re faced […]
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Positive Deviance

What’s that? Another SEP Blog Battle you say? Of course I’ll chime in! What’s that? The first topic I’ve got is Positive Deviance? Ok… What the heck is Positive Deviance? Well, what do I think it is based on that statistics course I took 15 years ago, and based on more recent dealings with tracking […]
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Code Reviews – the way it should be?

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 […]
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Code Review Observers

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 […]
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Lessons Learned in Automated UI Testing

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.  […]
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SEP Startup Weekend

SEP Startup Weekend is by far the most fun thing I do at work. A couple years ago, in a conference room, a handful of SEPeers were discussing the book ReWork. We all had mixed reviews on the book, but one thing was for certain: We all needed to participate in this current startup culture. […]
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