Laws of Software Engineering · Principle
Principle
Cognitive Load
The mental effort needed to understand or change a system. There is a fixed budget per person and per team.
How to use it. When teams slow down, look for new sources of load: new services to remember, new tools, new domains. Speed problems are often load problems in disguise.
How it gets misused. Treated as personal weakness: "They should just learn it." Cognitive load belongs to the system. The fix is to reduce the load on the team. Looking for tougher people does not help.
Related
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Pattern
Team Topologies
Four kinds of team (working on a stream of value, building a platform, helping others, or owning something complicated). Three ways teams can interact (working together, providing a service, or helping someone learn).
- Principle Psychological Safety The shared belief that you can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and disagree without being punished or humiliated.
- Law Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety Only variety can absorb variety. A controller must be able to handle at least as many distinct states as the system it is trying to control.
Clusters
- The Culture and Incidents cluster - How organisations learn, or fail to, from what goes wrong.