CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
signals-and-practices · storey-2026-triple-debt
- Citation
- storey-2026-triple-debt
- Claim ID
- signals-and-practices
- Assertion
- Storey lists signals of cognitive debt, including resistance to change, unexpected results from changes, slow onboarding, loss of knowledge of who knows what, and a low bus factor. She proposes mitigations including code review, pair programming, system walkthroughs, retrospectives, deliberate communication, and having an agent reimplement features to rebuild understanding.
- Quote
Resistance to change: low confidence in understanding the system may make developers across the team reluctant to modify it [...] Unexpected results: a reliable signal of cognitive debt is when a team member makes a change expecting one set of observable outcomes, but sees something else entirely [...] Low bus factor: only one person or very few on the team truly understands the system [...] human code review, for example, is valuable not only for catching defects but for spreading understanding across the team. Pair programming serves a similar function. [...] system walkthroughs where developers explain code they did not write [...] reimplementation to repair cognitive debt
- Quote language
- en
- Locator
- section: Diagnosing Cognitive Debt; Practices for Mitigating Cognitive Debt
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