Agency: The United States Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO) strengthens and vitalizes the U.S. economy through leadership in the areas of intellectual property (IP) policy, protection, and enforcement. The USPTO is at the cutting edge of the nation’s technological progress and achievement. Continued demand for patents and trademarks underscores the ingenuity of American inventors and entrepreneurs. IP protection for U.S. innovators and entrepreneurs worldwide plays a significant role in enabling, expanding, and commercialization of new ideas and innovations. These innovations and creations act as a catalyst for prosperity through job creation and development of new products and services, improvements in productivity, and preservation of natural resources for future generations.
Challenge: In pursuit of its mission, the USPTO relies upon cutting-edge technology, robust infrastructure, and reliable business systems to efficiently run the operations, optimize patent and trademark quality. The USPTO has an extensive portfolio of legacy solutions in mission areas. Outdated infrastructure, databases, and applications are sometimes intricately connected, within and between solutions, making it difficult to upgrade or replace a single solution element. Most critical systems require intricate and detailed efforts (e.g., code refactoring) to achieve stabilization to efficiently support USPTO’s mission. Some of these systems were being stabilized through modernization. The operational risk profile evolved and shifted as the technology stack continues to age and modernization was underway. A balanced approach (stabilization and modernization) was required to stabilize, maintain and operate legacy systems while they evolve into new modern systems.
Solution: Technik Inc., as a prime contractor to USPTO, supports the Software Quality Assurance Division (SQAD) in all aspects of software quality assurance, quality control, and defect management for 30 products within Patent, Trademarks, Enterprise Business, and Enterprise Infrastructure product lines. A transition from a project-based IT delivery structure to a product-based IT services model was essential to accelerate the digital transformation and ensure reliable and high-performing infrastructure and business systems. It was critical to delivering uninterrupted operations and services to USPTO customers while bridging the gap between development and production through coordinated testing efforts across functional, non-functional, security, and compliance aspects of product architecture. Technik’s Quality Engineers efficiently created reusable testing suites for database testing, functional testing, interface testing, software compatibility testing, user acceptance testing, regression testing, end-to-end testing, testing in the cloud, performance testing, load testing, mobile testing, cross-browser testing, and Section 508 testing. Innovations delivered include:
- Agile Approach: Technik advances USPTO’s Agile ways of working by embedding all key roles co-located with the product teams. This co-location integrated all needed skills within the team, often through cross-skilled individuals that have expertise in multiple areas and the ability to collaborate across disciplines and increase the flow of high-quality, high-value software for production use.
- Test Automation: With a renewed focus and expectation of automated testing, we systematically reduced the number of manual test cases and improved testing time. Progressively increasing the test coverage, we improved the testing accuracy and enabled analysis and reporting while promoting reusable testing modules across the products.
- Best Practices and Methodologies. Integrating proven methodologies, test automation frameworks, and test data management best practices, Technik’s Quality engineers developed and integrated testing scripts and facilitated secured data provisioning for non-production use. Our test engineers implemented observability, conducted root-cause analysis, and performed deliberate retrospectives that capture clear lessons learned for future reference.
- Enablement of DevSecOps: Unifying the software development (Dev), security (Sec), and support/operations (Ops), Technik enabled the adoption of DevSecOps principles and practices, including 12 Factor app methodology1 to deliver software-as-a-service on cloud platforms. This includes design-build methodologies that account for all non-production infrastructure and data needs (e.g., secure data capture, masking, encryption, storage, and provisioning).
As a trusted partner, Technik enables and accelerates USPTO’s IT transformation journey through integrated quality assurance, quality control, and defect management delivering stable, reliable, and high-performing systems that are future-ready, adaptable, resilient, and responsive to changing business needs.