Parkinson's Law of Triviality - Related Principles and Formulations

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 scientist Philip Wadler. This principle asserts that the bulk of discussion on programming language design centers around syntax (which, for purposes of the argument is considered a solved problem), as opposed to semantics.
• Sayre's law is a more general principle, which holds (among other formulations) 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.
• The duck technique in corporate programming is an applied example of Parkinson's law of triviality: a programmer expects their corporate office to insist on a change to something (anything at all) on every presentation to show that they're participating, so a programmer adds an element they expect corporate to remove on purpose. Quoted from Jeff Atwood's blog, Coding Horror:

This started as a piece of corporate lore at Interplay Entertainment. It was well known that producers (a game industry position roughly equivalent to project manager) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "That looks great. Just one thing: get rid of the duck."

The law has been misquoted as the "colour of the bike shed" effect", although in Parkinson's discussion the issue related to the construction of the bicycle shed, with no reference to its colour.