queen's duck
A feature put into a design as a lightning rod for bike shedding. In other words, it’s designed to be criticized and draw criticism away from actually important parts of the design.
Comes from a (probably apocryphal)story where someone building chess pieces gave the Queen piece a pet duck. Their boss went through the design and gave the criticism “get rid of that duck”. It was a win win, because the boss felt like they were contributing and the designer didn’t need to change any actual parts of the design.
