Law of triviality

When submitting a document, design change or any proposal for review among peers we've all been exposed to the law of triviality. In other words a disproportionate amount of comments like "typo?", "change the variable name?" or other trivial objections that don't address the main topic.

The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly 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 staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

The term bike-shedding and bike-shed effect have been used in software development to reference the same idea, brought up in a 1999 FreeBSD email thread.