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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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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You Won’t Know, If You Never Ask…

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 […]
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Test First Programming – It is kind of like Martial Arts…

Test-Driven-Development/Design (TDD) has been a hot topic of conversation in our office recently (lots of external and internal training about TDD). I think the biggest* “ah, ha”* for me, throughout these conversations, was that TDD is nothing more than a tool.  A very powerful tool that has numerous benefits. TDD is not, however, some silver […]
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SEP Blog Battle: Good Idea, Bad Idea

Bad Ideas We all have them It’s true, as much as we hate to admit it. I’ve had my fair share, and I’m bound to have even more. That doesn’t mean I’m going to share these ideas with the world or run off and implement things now, but it does mean that I have an […]
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Spec Driven Versus Client Satisfaction in Outsourcing

Chris Shinkle introduced us to the Kano model of customer satisfaction while internally presenting his Stop Doing Kanban, Start Learning lecture that he delivered at this year’s LSSC. The Kano Model of Customer Satisfaction: As an outsourcing partner, this model has direct implications for SEP. The Performance axis represents our client’s needs in a solution. […]
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