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 Named a Best Places to Work Company for 14th Consecutive Year

SEP has once again been recognized as one of Indiana’s Best Places to Work for the 14th year consecutive year.  The statewide survey and award program evaluates participating organizations and honors those with the highest levels of employee satisfaction and…
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A Matter of When, Not If

Prologue You are enjoying a brisk December evening by the fireplace. The tea in your cup warms your hands and fills your nose with fragrant aroma. Then you realize that Christmas is in a week. The Stories in our Heads Are you anxious? Maybe you don’t have time to get presents shipped in time. Maybe […]
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Circumventing The Dark Side of Design

A Tale Old As Time Humans have had the tendency to be deceptive to one another for longer than any existing historical document can recall. One of the most infamous examples of this act being used as a literary device is the myth of the Trojan Horse in Homer’s Odyssey. This victory trophy, given to […]
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Diagram of outcome, opportunity, and solutions

Planning Features with Opportunity Solution Trees

New software projects often come with a long list of potential features. How do you evaluate these ideas before investing costly resources into development? At SEP, we’ve been mapping potential features with opportunity solution trees. They are a way to visualize the relationships between ideas and their desired outcomes, and to manage the gaps in […]
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10 things I learned in my first 10 episodes of podcasting

I’ve had the opportunity to interview talented, driven and successful leaders in Indy tech. We often don’t get to hear how software products get built and what it took to make them a reality. These stories of success and challenge have been encouraging for me to hear so I summarized some of my biggest takeaways.   […]
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A sign reading

Why Software Accessibility Matters

I’m a designer with Color Vision Deficiency (CVD). A lot of people, myself included, refer to CVD as “color blindness.” The term “color blind” can be a bit misleading and gives rise to all kinds of funny questions like, “What color is my shirt?” or, “How do you dress yourself?” The reality is, I do […]
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Example Breadboard

Breadboarding: A Simple Way to Prototype

There is an awkwardness defining the solution for a software project. Some projects define the solution by generating a backlog of features to implement. They specify what should be built, but create few insights about the user’s experience. On the other hand, a project could start by emphasizing the visual experience with clickable mockups. While […]
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Tearing Down the Silos: 3 Ways to Foster Better Collaboration

Collaboration between design and development has historically been an uphill battle. It used to be that a designer (or team of designers) designed a software application, and then handed it over the fence to the software engineers and wished them the best of luck. As you can imagine, this silo approach ended in unexpected results […]
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One Lead’s Journey to Successfully Improving My Software Forecasting With Monte Carlo Simulation

What is this? Forecasting is not a skill I use frequently, which means it takes me time to remember each of the steps and the small details I’ve forgotten. There’s a lot of great information out there, but reading it and refreshing my memory takes longer than I’d like it to. My goal here is […]
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The Mobbed Mob Blog: A Retrospective of Mob Programming

Blog Authors: Nicole Selig, Dane Acena, Jesse Gallardo, Lakshmi Galla, and Blake Steel For unique situations, sometimes you need unique solutions. Our internship has been anything but what most might consider ordinary. We were five interns thrust into a remote work environment due to the worldwide pandemic. We wondered how we would be able to […]
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