Bus factor

The number of people who would have to disappear before the work stops. A bus factor of one means a single person holds something nobody else can pick up: the venue relationship, the sponsor thread, the password to the event page. The fix is not heroism, it is a second person per function who could run it badly, plus documents that live somewhere shared rather than in one inbox. Badly is the honest bar here. A second owner who does the job at half quality is enormously better than a function that goes dark two weeks before doors.

Source: The term comes from software project management, where it is the standard shorthand for concentration of knowledge in one person. The event application in this course rests on the DevOpsDays Organizing Guide’s hard rule that a local organizing team must have at least three organizers from three different organizations before an event is listed. DevOpsDays states its own reason as wanting “a broader base of support and involvement from the community,” and refuses to greenlight events run by a single company; reading that rule as bus-factor protection is the course’s framing, not theirs.

First used in: 1.2 · The org chart: who you actually need.