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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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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Title Goes Here

Creating something brand new is hard. No matter if it’s a painting, a system architecture, or a conference talk, the creative effort of conjuring up something from nothing is difficult. Take me for example, staring at a text editor, trying to figure out what to type next and think up a clever title. Writers know […]
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2 Practices We Adopted Since Going Remote

My team of five has been working together on a cloud-based learning system for nearly a year. Since going remote, we needed to find a way to keep us connected just as if we were working next to each other in the office. We decided to try two new things: – End of the Day […]
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3 Tools to Develop Your Agile Product Strategy

I recently had the opportunity to attend a webinar on agile product strategy given by our Director of Innovation, Chris Shinkle. Here are three tools I took away from the presentation that you can use to develop an agile product strategy that works. The Problem Do any of these situations sound familiar? Your product strategy […]
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Designer + Developer Collaboration

Context SEP started with developers, grew by hiring more developers, evolved by hiring designers. And since the developers “were here first,” there’s an easy and terrible potential for us to think of “incorporating designers into the development” rather than “incorporating developers into the designing.” My team chose a third way, which you all probably know […]
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Software Development is Entirely Too Loud

(me 🙋‍♀️, total introvert) I recently read Quiet, a book by Susan Cain. It’s a really approachable aggregation of a ton of research around introversion. I read Quiet searching for ways I can be a better teammate to my introverted colleagues, and it did not disappoint. It highlighted a few ways we, software engineers, have […]
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