Parkinson's law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staffbike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task. The law has been applied to software development and other activities. The terms bicycle-shed effect, bike-shed effect, and bike-shedding were coined as metaphors to illuminate the law of triviality; it was popularised in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by the Danish software developerPoul-Henning Kampin 1999 and has spread from there to the whole software industry.
Argument
The concept was first presented as a corollary of his broader "Parkinson's law" spoof of management. He dramatizes this "law of triviality" with the example of a committee's deliberations on an atomic reactor, contrasting it to deliberations on a bicycle shed. As he put it: "The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved." A reactor is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so one assumes that those who work on it understand it. On the other hand, everyone can visualize a cheap, simple bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add a touch and show personal contribution. Problems arise after a suggestion of building something new for the community, like a bike shed, causes everyone involved to argue about the details. This is a metaphor indicating that it is not necessary to argue about every little feature based simply on the knowledge 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.
Related principles and formulations
There are several other principles, well known in specific problem domains, which express a similar sentiment. In the context of programming-language design, one encounters Wadler's law, named for computer scientistPhilip Wadler. This principle asserts that the bulk of discussion on programming language design centers on syntax, as opposed to semantics. Sayre's law is a more general principle, which holds that "In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake"; many formulations of the principle focus on academia. Atwood's duck: A countermeasure is the "duck" technique in corporate programming: a programmer expects his or her corporate office to insist on at least one change on every presentation to show that they're participating, regardless of the benefits of that change. Consequently, the programmer intentionally adds an element they expect corporate to remove. Quoted from Jeff Atwood's blog, Coding Horror:
