From Wikipedia:

Parkinson’s law of triviality, also known as bikeshedding, bike-shed effect, and the bicycle-shed example, is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job was to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time on discussions about relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the non-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task to criticise constructively.

How is it that I’ve spent so much time around software development and not heard this term before?