At last night's Extreme Tuesday Club meeting we talked about the use of Gold Cards as a way of handling problems that can arise in successful Extreme Programming teams.  The idea of Gold Cards was presented in this paper from XP Universe 2001 which came out of the original Connextra team (an early and influential London XP team).

When an XP team is functioning successfully and doing paired programming, frequent releases and working at a constant it can be difficult to find time to do individual investigation on new approaches to problems.  There are several difficulties for a successful XP team:

• It can be difficult to take time out and think about new and innovative approaches to a problem.
• Often innovative new ideas come from individuals thinking laterally rather than a team focussed on task completion.
• Sometimes pairing and the team work made it hard to highlight positive contributions of individuals, or to handle performance reviews.

The Gold Card was a way of overcoming these problems.  The index card is a core part of XP planning, used to write User Stories and drive development.  The Gold Card is simply an index card that allows a developer to spend some a day of solo time investigating a topic of their choice, ideally with some business benefits.  They used this system:

• Each developer had two Gold Cards each month, so about 10% of work time.
• During the morning stand-up meeting a developer could elect to use the Gold Card
• The developer writes on the card what they want to achieve and provides an update at the next morning's stand-up meeting as well as on the Wiki.

Part of the discussion last night was how one global financial bank allow their developers to do skunkworks style tasks on Friday afternoon.  Gold Cards provide a mechanism for time-shifting this idea.

Gold Cards helped promote a 'praise culture' within the group.  It also proved a successful motivation tool.  On top of this there were significant business benefits, such as reducing project risk, increasing development efficiency and most surprisingly, generating a business opportunity that became the company's major product.