SEP Blog

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 Winning Company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards

Westfield, IN - January 2022, SEP, a software product design and development firm has been announced as a winning company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards. This recognizes SEP as one of the best tech companies to work for in…
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New Leads Need The Engagement Chronicle

On the last day of a 20 month-long project, my customer asked me, “Could you give a brief overview of everything you guys have done for us over the last couple of years?” 😅 As a new lead, I hadn’t thought of starting an engagement chronicle until closer to the end of the project. By […]
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From Terrible Things Come Innovation

As a software architect, I do what I can to stay abreast of the world around me. As new technologies, design patterns, and so on emerge, I try to learn enough about them to make informed decisions on where they might prove useful or if I can safely ignore them. I think about their relevance […]
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Disruptive Innovation in 19 Not-So-Easy Steps

I ran across Chunka Mui (well, his writing, anyway) when looking into autonomous cars recently; he has a 7 part article on how disruptive autonomous cars like the Google car will be, to all kinds of industries: ERs, insurance, real estate and others. His ideas are very similar to the Lean Startup protocol, so I thought you […]
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SEP TeamWorks and Organizational Habits

In SEP TeamWorks and Visual Learning, I wanted to convey the visual nature of** TeamWorks** as a fresh reinvention of Kanban clarity. In this post, I want to focus on TeamWork’s organizational aspects of digital linkage and storage that I like. So with TeamWorks, we have a beautiful pictorial representation of our Kanban board stored […]
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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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Fire the Firefighters

Are there fires occurring on your projects? You know the ones: We have a major delivery coming, and the testers just found 12 new defects. The user study uncovered a missing feature, and we were just about ready for delivery. Management changed the direction of the project halfway through. Oh, and, by the way, project […]
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Beware of the Simple Things

Beware of the Simple Things: 3 Flags to Look Out for in Domains Your new client already has a requirements document, and has been doing work in the domain for 10 years. They use simple concepts: reports, studies, projects, updates, project IDs, owners. They ‘just’ want to transfer their Access data into a relational database, […]
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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

Originally posted on Matt Swanson’s website 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. […]
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5 Benefits of Outsourcing Software Development

Outsourcing is the business practice where a company uses outside firms to do select projects and special work that might normally be performed within that company. Some examples of what might be outsourced (besides software development) include payroll processing, shipping and distribution, and accounting. You are essentially sending your work to be done by an […]
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