Standard Lemma guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
noun
Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: uncountable
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
noun
Procrastination.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: uncountable
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
verb
present participle and gerund of bikeshed
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: form-of, gerund, participle, present
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
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.
