I'm not sure if he came up with the term but I'm going to credit this idea to James Lewis who used it in relation to a very stuck client we were working on at ThoughtWorks.

The golden donkey cart is a software delivery anti-pattern where a team ceases to make step changes to their product but instead undergoes cycles of redevelopment of the same product making every more complex and rich iterations of the same feature set.

So a team creates a product, the donkey cart, and it's great because you can move big heavy things around in it. After a while though you're used to the donkey cart and you're wondering if things couldn't be better. So the team gets together and realise that they could add suspension so the ride is not so bumpy and you can get some padded seats and maybe the cart could have an awning and some posts with rings and hooks to make it easier to lash on loads. So donkey cart v2 is definitely better and it is easier and more comfortable to use so you wonder, could it be better yet.

So the team gets back together and decides that this time they are going to build the ultimate donkey cart. It's going to be leather and velvet trim, carbon fibre to reduce weight, a modular racking system with extendible plates for cargo. The reins are going to have gold medallions, it's going to be awesome.

But it is still going to be a donkey cart and not the small crappy diesel truck that is going to be the first step on making donkey carts irrelevant.

The gold-plated donkey cart is actually a variant on both the Iron Law of Oligarchy and the Innovator's Dilemma.

The donkey cart is part of the valuable series of incremental improvements that consists of most business as usual. Making a better donkey cart makes real improvements for customers and users.

The donkey cart team is also there to create donkey carts. That's what they think and talk about all the time. It is almost churlish to say that they are really the cargo transport team because probably no-one has ever expressed their purpose or mission in those terms because no-one else has thought of the diesel truck either.

Finally any group of people brought together for a purpose will never voluntarily disband itself. They will instead find new avenues of donkey cart research that they need to pursue and there will be the donkey cart conference circuit to be part of. The need for new donkey cart requirements will be self-evident to the team as well as the need for more people and time to make the next donkey cart breakthrough, before one of their peers does.