Meanings
nounbus factor (plural bus factors)
plural bus factors
- businessA 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
Origin
From the phrase “get hit by a bus” as an informal way to describe a person suddenly becoming unavailable.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
APA
bus factor. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bus%20factor
MLA
“bus factor.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bus%20factor. Accessed November 3, 2026.
Chicago
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “bus factor,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bus%20factor.
Source: bus factor on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.