bikeshedding

Parkinson's Law of Triviality, also known as bikeshedding or the bicycle-shed example, is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson demonstrated this by contrasting the triviality of a bike shed to a nuclear reactor. Later, Poul-Henning Kamp applied the law to software development and introduced the colour of the bike shed as the proverbial trivial detail receiving disproportionate attention.