SR&ED filings are a yearly thing, which leads them to be left to the end of the year. Ideally, documentation should be performed as an ongoing part of R&D and Engineering activities. To this end, I’ve set up a process for my team.

A simple process

  • Add an “SR&ED” label to Github to each of the repositories issues are stored.
  • This label is to be applied to all items that meet SR&ED requirements.
  • Identification should be performed when the item is “put on the board” for development to be started. This ensures that no issue which is eligible slips through.

A simple template

For tickets marked with this label, all experiments performed should be documented using a simple format

Initial challenge: (Problem definition)

  • Point form breakdown of the technical challenge. This outlines the technical issue being solved as opposed to the actual feature being designed or customer problem being solved.

Initial observations: (What we saw, measured)

  • The measurements or data that help us define the scope or the nature of the problem.

Experiments performed: (What we tried)

  • What we did. For development, this might be various things that were tried. Grouped by type. For example, when doing os work, we might make changes to the Ethernet adapter code or netgraph. In this case, both Ethernet Driver and Netgraph become types.

Automation

Internally, we use Clockify for managing engineering time. Clockify has an API and the ability to add a description for a task. To allow easy co-relation from project to task and to ease writeups/filing, the Github issue id is to be added to the description field in the format.

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Organization/Repository/#Id

This format is used when committing to a repository to ensure that the commit links to the issue. What this allows us to do is to query the Clockify API using the time-entry GET request as below by task and project, allowing easy co-relation.

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GET /workspaces/{workspaceId}/user/{userId}/time-entries

Additionally, since the Github issue has issue updates in an SR&ED compatible format, we can generate a straightforward spreadsheet.

There’s no code here currently, but I will release it when I get around to writing it.