GoldCards

Just happened across this article about the lack of time put into assessing "buy in" solutions when doing XP.

Anti-XP article

Reading this article I think he kind of has a point. At connextra we have integrated a large number of pre-existing open source solutions into our project, largely due to time spend on Gold Cards. There would be no time for developers to evaluate these solutions in a strictly vanilla XP (with no add-ons).

MpC

A practice used with XP at ConneXtra. A Gold Card is reserved time for learning and exploration. Each Index Cards with a gold star on entitles the holder to 1 day of work on new ideas At ConneXtra each developer got 2 cards per month. The developer chose when to use them and the results demonstrated at weekly “Show & Tell” Presented at XP Universe conference in 2001. The write-up is in the book "XP Perspectives"