DesignPlus, CIPO (Apr 2006 – Apr 2007)
DesignPlus is an in-house application used by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in processing applications to register industrial designs. This is a concept similar to a trademark or a copyright, but it applies specifically in the domain of proprietary designs for industrial products.
DesignPlus has a user interface designed in Oracle Forms, and makes extensive use of PL/SQL packages to implement business logic. During his year at CIPO, Peter designed and developed several new modules as well as providing ongoing fixes and enhancements to existing modules. He delivered a module to handle merging and splitting of companies and their registered designs. He also successfully implemented a cleanup of duplicate data including creation of technical specifications, design, and impact analysis for this process. On a number of occasions he was called upon to provide technical advice (both formal/documented and informal/undocumented) on issues arising in the course of required work.
During the latter part of his time at CIPO, Peter was asked to take on a team leadership role and managed a release of DesignPlus, including scoping of the release, requirements gathering and clarification, definition of test plans, and all other aspects of the release life cycle including unit testing, code reviews and user acceptance testing.