bikeshedding

Definition

Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.

Etymology

From bikeshed + -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp and has spread from there to the software industry at large.

Example Sentences

• "Exactly. Bikeshedding the millions of possible reasons the queue/ratelimit was triggered is silly."
• "Modulo giving developers and the user community a few weeks to comment on the matter and make any last convincing cases for keeping it, I agree. That's not to say that I want to see two weeks worth of i386 bike-shedding and highly emotional arguments for keeping it purely on general principle, I'm saying that we need to let a couple of weeks go by so that along with the emotional bike sheds, anyone with a *technical* argument for retaining support has a chance to be heard."
• "Hmm. Sounds like my RFC is taken to be a RFB (Request For Bikeshedding)."