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…
Read More
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 […]
Read More
Test Driven Blogging – using O.R.I.D. to keep my writing focused…
Recently I read a book called “The Art of Focused Conversations“. This book gave me a lot of great advice on how to have better conversations, especially with people that I work with. The book is split into 2 halves- the first half is the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ about conversations; the second half is […]
Read More
Android, Robotium and Spoon: A Practical Guide for Testing on Android Devices
Developing for Android is a lot of fun. It has actually become a niche for me here at SEP. Android has changed quite a bit over the past 3 years since I first started hacking on it – action bars, more screen sizes, and probably the biggest addition…fragments. But one thing certainly has not changed. […]
Read More
Android Studio – Not Ready for Primetime
Android Studio is a new IDE that Google has released into Early Access Preview. It is based on the popular IntelliJ editor; the existing development environment relied on an Eclipse plugin. This was really exciting news for SEP engineers that have done Android development. In addition to more the powerful refactoring tools that come with […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
“That wasn’t so bad…” – but why did we find so many dead-end streets?
SEP is having another blog battle, and this week my topic is “That wasn’t so bad”. Once upon a time, a teammate and myself were tasked with tracking down this gnarly bug. We had little-to-no steps to reproduce this bug, but we had both seen the bug with our own eyes. (And seeing is believing, […]
Read More
Code Reviews – the way it should be?
This past Monday and Tuesday, I attended all-day training sessions led by David Hussman. He’s a big Agile guy, but more than Agile he kind of picks and chooses the parts he believes work – i.e. he’s huge on TDD and pair programming and continuous integration. Pointedly, he said if you don’t have the chops […]
Read More
Test First Programming – It is kind of like Martial Arts…
Test-Driven-Development/Design (TDD) has been a hot topic of conversation in our office recently (lots of external and internal training about TDD). I think the biggest* “ah, ha”* for me, throughout these conversations, was that TDD is nothing more than a tool. A very powerful tool that has numerous benefits.TDD is not, however, some silver bullet […]
Read More
How to be more confident in your changes – Test First…
I was tag-teaming a change with one of my teammates, Brian, and I didn’t even know where to begin. I wasn’t nearly as confident with the scheduling logic as Brian was, which is why I was really excited to partner up with him in order to make the changes we needed. First, write tests that […]
Read More
One Small Step Toward TDD, One Small Leap for SEP
One small Step Toward TDD I have been reading about TDD and unit testing for about 7 years now and have not fully adopted TDD. It has a ton of time tested benefits including writing less production code, writing simpler code, making your code easier to change, making your code easier to test and the […]
Read More