Word.ws English Dictionary

bus factor

bus factor noun: a measurement of the risk of losing team members, in terms of information and abilities no longer available to the team.

Noun

bus factor (plural bus factors)

  1. A measurement of the risk of losing team members, in terms of information and abilities no longer available to the team.
    • It's also important to strengthen what we call the bus factor of your project. Bus factor (noun): the number of people that need to get hit by a bus before your project is completely doomed. What's your team's bus factor?2012, Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman, Team Geek: A Software Developer's Guide to Working Well with Others, O'Reilly Media, Inc., →ISBN, page 7

Forms of bus factor

pluralbus factors

Origin of bus factor

From the phrase “get hit by a bus” as an informal way to describe a person suddenly becoming unavailable.

Questions about bus factor

What does bus factor mean?
Bus factor means a measurement of the risk of losing team members, in terms of information and abilities no longer available to the team.
What part of speech is bus factor?
Bus factor is a noun.
What is the plural of bus factor?
The plural of bus factor is bus factors.

Words near bus factor in the dictionary

  1. bus conductresses
  2. bus driver
  3. bus drivers
  4. bus duct
  5. bus ducts
  6. bus factor
  7. bus factors
  8. bus fare
  9. bus fares
  10. bus girl
  11. bus girls

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bus factor (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bus factor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bus_factor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.