wave a dead chicken jargon
To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended. "I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug".
Compare voodoo programming, rain dance.
[The Jargon File]
(1996-09-08)