Agile 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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What’s in your Utility Belt?

When developing software, we engineers have to use a variety of tools to deliver the right product to our clients. As Batman has practically everything in his utility belt, let’s see what I keep up my sleeve as staples of software engineering. The Soft Skills These are the skills I use for software engineering and […]
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The Point of Particularly Personal Personas

The Agile software development movement has a concept called user personas. During a project’s spin-up, developers are encouraged to create these personas as representative users. A typical persona may be “Victor the Vice President”. Victor is a VP at his company. He will use the software for high-level data reporting, but not data entry. On […]
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Shades of Grey

As professional football gets back in the swing of things, I’m reminded of one of the iconic plays from the sport: the Hail Mary. You have to score, but you have no time left and you’re on the wrong side of the field. So, what do you do? You throw the ball way up and […]
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5 Ways All Software Projects are Product Replacements

I was updating my bio at work for the last few projects I’ve been on since I was between projects. I looked back at some of the projects I’ve worked on and remembered the “good ol’ times”. Some projects were executed well and the client appreciated the outcome (read: warm fuzzies), while others produced a […]
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Getting the Most Value with a Development Partner

What is software development? When we say software we typically mean a software product to sell to a market or a system to increase productivity. In both cases, doesn’t the customer have some idea of the cost and potential value before the project is initiated? If the initial estimated cost versus the expected value (Rate […]
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The 30 Second Standup

The Three Pillars of Standup Meetings: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? What is blocking your progress? Everyone stands in a circle and takes their turn answering the questions. The whole meeting should last only a few minutes and gets everyone of the same page. But when you consider all the […]
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Lessons Learned as a Scrum Master

I have been a Scrum Master for my team of 8-10 since November of 2011, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.  I was very lucky to land this position.  Previously I had done development and testing projects, but my only lead experience was for a team of myself […]
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My Ideal Software Project: 7 Values I Believe In…

At SEP, we have very diverse teams, clients, and projects. With all of that variety and diversity, comes a lot of variation in how projects are run. Almost every project, in my experience, has used different processes and techniques. I was recently inspired by one of my coworkers, Jennifer, by a letter that she wrote […]
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Making and Changing Plans

We all make plans everyday. Small plans, big plans, short term plans and long term plans. We plan for retirement; we plan for the weekend and we plan for our next meal. We make plans for everything and hope nothing changes. But inevitably our best laid schemes gang aft agley. Gang’ing Aft Agley So what […]
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