This is an early paper Tim Mackinnon co-authored when working as the team lead at Connextra.
When I observed that my team wasn’t taking the time to innovate, I asked my colleagues to work with me to help shape an idea around a light weight mechanism for scheduling research time without feeling guilty. The result was a great success and led to the joint publication of a paper, which is still applicable for agile teams today. A small fun fact, is that originally I wanted to call them green cards (the color of the index cards we had the most of), until it was pointed out that it sounded too much like an immigration system. Having recently returned from the dentist, where I noticed my patient card had a gold start in the top corner - I proposed the name “gold cards” instead, which consequently stuck - and we used the same gold star on the corner of each index card that proposed a research idea.
The final paper was presented at XPUniverse 2001 by our colleague Julian Higman, and appears in the proceedings Extreme Programming Perspectives
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