I knew the general concept of this word but it was thrown around today so I decided to research it.

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (also known as the bicycle shed example, and by the expression colour of the bikeshed) is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. source

Made famous in software development by Poul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD dev)

*“The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.” *source

Seems to be true to me. We shouldn’t needlessly argue about trivial details.

I leave you with this..Is there a software development group in existence that does not bikeshed?:

Futile investment of time and energy in marginal technical issues, often including annoying propaganda. (as defined by Wiktionary)

I doubt it, but is it always a bad thing? Comments?