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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What Really Matters

On November 1st, the project I had been working on for seven years ended. It was an incredibly rewarding professional and technical experience. I learned what it was like to integrate into a large company and dozens of other development teams. I worked in technologies I had never worked in before, and on a code […]
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Facilitation: Don’t Lose Before You Start

So you want to facilitate a workshop for a team? Maybe you’re external to the team and have been asked to help by facilitating. Awesome, it’ll be fun. Just show up at the time and place annnnnnnd you’ve already lost. You better think (think) Think about what you’re trying to do — Aretha Franklin Ask […]
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Five Things I Learned Working with Software Engineers

Introduction Hi, I’m Jordan Thayer, and I’m a research scientist by training. I got my PhD in 2012 from the University of New Hampshire, where I focused on Artificial Intelligence. My undergraduate degree  was in Computer Science too; I got that from Rose-Hulman back in 2006. I’ve been programming things for about as long as […]
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Did the 1973 Oil Crisis Create Lean Software Development?

US car companies were booming in the early 1970’s. Americans loved big cars and had cash to buy them. Demand for oil rose so quickly that, by 1969, the US began importing oil. Not long after, oil exporting nations began using US dependence on their oil to influence US foreign policy. During the first embargo […]
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Building a Circle of Support: Letting others in, being vulnerable, and gaining self-awareness

Cue the “Meet the Parents” meme… We’ve all seen it, the awkward moment where Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro are in the dressing room and good ol’ future father-in-law is accusing Ben Stiller’s character of nefarious acts: The thing I love about that scene is someone caring about another person enough to call them […]
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Pulling the Andon Cord

In the manufacturing world, the Andon cord obligates anybody who spots a problem to stop production. Anybody. Andon cords are a part of the Toyota Production System. The Andon cord is a simple rope that extends the length of the production line. (Black/yellow cords in the picture above) Pulling the rope stops production. Toyota not […]
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Software Development in a Regulated Environment

Getting mission critical medical products launched to market means getting FDA approval. And these days that process often starts in software development. The Food and Drug Administration regulates the medical device market, with many constraints on developing products. First, it may be helpful to talk about the history of the FDA and its importance in […]
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Automatically keeping Git identities distinct between accounts

I’ve ended up with multiple GitHub identities. One for personal use, another for SEP use, and still more for many of our clients. Leaning on Git conditional includes, and a bit of manual work upfront, my GitHub identities can be “automatically” kept distinct. Like many people, I’ve setup a global Git configuration for my name […]
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Design Studios With A Team

Why Use Design Studios? Design studios by definition vary from place to place and shift when the participant roles and sizes are different. Since design studios are used to culminate to a team-agreed user interface (or close to it) approach for a user story task(s), the scope can be altered, depending on the need. You […]
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