Gold Plating is a concept from requirements management which for some strange reason I find amusing. Gold plating is simply the creation of “stuff” which it has not been agreed satisfies any stated need. We might be lucky and the gold plated “stuff” turns out to be useful. On the other hand we may end up seeing an ashtray on a motorbike.

With pleasing symmetry to my last posting about knowing when you are finished, gold plating turns out to be just another report, but at the lower implementation level:

Gold Plating (as revealed by Requirements Traceability Analysis)

with respect to the SR, gold plating in the “slides” is identified by finding any slide which does not have an outgoing satisfaction link and drawing a red box around it, as we have done for the white elephant. This corresponds to the situation where the owner of the SR has outsourced the implementation of the SR as the creation of slides, and is interested in tracking what is happening. The contractor has not yet proposed a satisfaction link for the white elephant, perhaps because they know that any such link would not be agreed meets a stated need in the SR (the SR owner gets to decide whether satisfaction links are good or not).

My postings on RM traceability are informed from my experience of talking to systems engineering consultants and practitioners who know what they are doing on very large systems and budgets, and so I am comfortable that at least some people in the world are happy to invest in a requirements management process where you actually do write down requirements and make links between them and with other life cycle assets. For my next RM posting project, I’m going to think about how to spread the word to those folks who would rather cut their own heads off than write down a requirement, never-mind user, system and test requirements.

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