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 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…
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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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The Anatomy of Event Storming

Here at SEP, we are continually toying with practices to help us learn from our clients. Learn about their worlds. Learn about their problems. And in this case, learning about their domains. Event storming is a “cross-discipline conversation between stakeholders with different backgrounds” (from https://www.eventstorming.com/). Said another way…event storming is an activity that we use as […]
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close up laptop keyboard and screen with code

SMART on FHIR: What is SMART? What is FHIR?

When creating an application that will be used by health care providers, a developer will often need to access data about a patient. This data is kept in Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. As a developer, one of the main struggles of creating such an application is that EHRs are not guaranteed to follow the […]
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Evaluating project opportunities

I’ve been having conversations at SEP about how to evaluate software project opportunities for our firm. We can talk about things like the what the project is, whether or not we think the client will be good to work with, or the size and budget of the company. These are all useful criteria when talking […]
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On tests and testing

Hello, gentle reader. Please allow me to rock your entire human face by dropping this truth bomb: Tests are about more than testing. “Obviously!” you yell, your riposte ringing out triumphantly against what is seemingly a rather anemic statement. The truth bomb has failed to detonate. Your entire human face remains unrocked. If you’ve ever […]
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SEP Book Club and Review for Creating Great Teams

Reading Lately — Teams, Orgs, and Vision

Previously I shared my “Reading Lately” list with a few books about motivation. Each publication from that list is still relevant in my thoughts, actions, and discussions with others at SEP. This time I am sharing 4 books that have greatly influenced the way I think about working collaboratively with people — whether on a […]
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CommunityHERO: A Lesson in Collaborative Design

Here at SEP, the PXT (product experience team) has been making a push for more collaborative design on the projects we’ve been involved in. By collaborative design I mean including not only designers, but engineers, product owners, and project managers in the design process. We’ve had success with it on several of our past projects, […]
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