Gold plating

Gold plating is a method of depositing a thin layer of gold onto the surface of another metal, most often copper or silver (to make silver-gilt), by chemical or electrochemical plating. This article covers plating methods used in the modern electronics industry; for more traditional methods, often used for much larger objects, see gilding.

Gold plating types

There are several types of gold plating used in the electronics industry:

Gold-plating (European Union law)

Gold-plating is pejorative term to characterise the process where an EU directive is given additional powers when being transposed into the national laws of member states. In operational terms, the European Commission defines gold-plating "an excess of norms, guidelines and procedures accumulated at national, regional and local levels, which interfere with the expected policy goals to be achieved by such regulation".

Business lobbyists generally argue against it because additional regulation tends to raise costs for businesses, but there are the few companies that can from it benefit.

Examples

The UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills gave the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 as an example of gold-plated EU legislation, because it had granted temporary workers the right to performance-related bonuses, something that was not in the original EU law, which dealt with "the right to the same pay as permanent staff".

In Italy, gold-plating has often been used as a device to pass through controversial measures and to ensure a lower degree of parliamentary scrutiny, particularly in periods of weak government.

Gold plating (software engineering)

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 a bad project management practice for different project management best practices and methodologies such as: Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) and Prince 2. 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.