Bike shedding

Bikeshedding occurs when a development team spends a disproportionate amount of time and effort on a trivial or unimportant detail of a system, such as the color of a bikeshed.

This most often occurs because the supposed “trivial” detail is one of the few such things that everyone in the room actually understands.

The solution is relatively simple, but scary: someone needs to be a dictator.

The problem arises when it is suggested to build something new for the community (such as a bicycle parking lot); then everyone wants to discuss its details.

With this metaphor it is indicated that it is not required to argue about every little detail when each one knows enough to do so; it is preferable only to build the parking lot; Trivial matters like color can easily be discussed or changed later.

Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.

Parkinson's Law of Triviality

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also known as bikeshedding, is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1977 argument that organizations give disproportionate weight to trivial matters.

Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job it is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent most of its time in nonsensical discussions about relatively trivial and unnecessary, but easy-to-understand matters (such as what materials to use for the roof columns of the parking lot of bicycles), while leaving aside the less trivial matters about the proposed designs of the nuclear power plant itself, which is not only much more important, but also a much more difficult and complex task to criticize constructively.

The law has been applied to the development of computer programs and other activities. The term “bikeshedding” has been coined as a metaphor to illustrate the “Parkinson’s Law of Triviality”.