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Gold plating in software engineering or Project Management (or time management in general) refers to continuing to work on a project or task well past the point where the extra effort is worth the value it adds (if any). After having met the requirements, the developer works on further enhancing the product, thinking the customer would be delighted to see additional or more polished features, rather than what was asked for or expected. The customer might be disappointed in the results, and the extra effort by the developer might be futile.
Gold plating is also considered as a bad project management practice for different project management best practices and methodologies such as: Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) and Prince2. In this case, gold plating refers to the addition of any feature not considered in the original scope plan (PMBoK) or business case (Prince2) at any point of the project since it introduces a new source of risks to the original planning i.e. additional testing, documentation, costs, timelines, etc. However, gold plating does not prevent new features from being added to the project, they can be added at any time as long as they follow the official change procedure and the impact of the change in all the areas of the project is taken into consideration.
Gold plating means intentionally adding extra features or functions to the products which were not included in the scope statement.
Usually, gold plating is performed by either the project team or the project manager with no additional cost to the client. Gold plating is done with good intentions and may be appreciated by the clients. However, there are many cases where it is not liked, and the gold plating backfires because you are adding some features to the product which were not demanded by the client. This might be considered as an unauthorized change in the scope, and the client can refuse to accept the product.
Gold plating = add extra work “ not accepted in project management “
Talha Aziz Managing Consultant at Streebo Inc.
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