SR&ED: documenting corporate knowledge and know-how

Good documentation not only supports your R&D work in connection with an SR&ED tax credit claim. Find out more about documenting.

Software engineering is suffering from a serious lack of documentation on work completed in the field to date. Finding relevant information can be difficult and valuable knowledge to support scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) work is often lacking.

Beyond providing evidence in support of tax credit claims, software engineering documentation is essential for building corporate knowledge and know-how.

Quality documentation

Studies and analyses carried out on software engineering in Germany and England, in particular, have shown that the hottest tool in the box is quality documentation. It’s a fast-moving field, but progress sometimes appears to take the back seat to initiatives that focus on achieving sales or completing a project rapidly, at the expense of quality.

For instance, firms in the sector are constantly onboarding and offboarding personnel. And when employees leave the business, the knowledge and know-how they’ve developed walk out the door with them. Which means documentation is vital for keeping that knowledge inhouse — be it for avoiding pitfalls or securing continuity. Quality documentation lets the next runners in the relay take up the torch without missing a beat.

Documentation methodologies

Various methodologies exist to help structure the design and analysis of work, as the above-noted studies illustrate. And while those studies are not new, the techniques they discuss remain effective, as documenting R&D work in software engineering is still rare today.

Among other things, these studies discuss research techniques for achieving project objectives and ways to develop assumptions. But most importantly, they focus on defining a standardized method for documenting software development experience.

Documenting knowledge or know-how does not directly address the documentation requirements for a specific program, such as SR&ED, but rather creates a catalogue of areas for documentation that can answer questions like those asked to determine if there is SR&ED.

Besides, reports are written primarily to describe a project’s different stages and portions of them can be extracted later on for programs such as SR&ED.

In a nutshell...

Using effective and structured documentation methodologies not only supports your R&D work in connection with an SR&ED tax credit claim, it also shows that your company:

• Is credible and experienced
• Provides accountability for its experts and managers
• Has a mature software development process