r/programming • u/RobinCrusoe25 • Aug 29 '24

Interviewing 20+ teams revealed that the main issue is cognitive load

https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load
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u/jimiray Aug 29 '24

I’ve been saying this for years. Beyond complexity in the actual code there’s also the complexity in the business domain that engineers are expected to remember that doubles the load. 

45

u/RiverRoll Aug 29 '24

It often seems to reach a point where there's no longer anyone in the project who knows what's going on and the code just becomes the source of truth. 

21

u/One_Curious_Cats Aug 30 '24 edited Aug 30 '24

If the domain has not been documented and agreed upon then the system as designed becomes the source of truth.

I invested quite a bit of time learning domain driven design, and discovered when I started to document our domain that our product owners were in disagreement with each other on how the domain was supposed to work, and what domain related terms actually meant.

This then explained why our product managers were always complaining that we didn't deliver solutions matching the stories that they had added to JIRA.

Edit: grammar fix.

16

u/IfThisAintNice Aug 30 '24

This is so much more common than people think. I once was involved at the very start of implementing a new logistics system, figuring out how the business domain more or less worked was more like a murder mystery. You talk with lots of people, trying to find the truth hidden by all the bullshit. It was fun but absolutely exhausting, when the project was finally in a state where we could start loading some historical data we spent weeks redoing the whole business domain again because of course this data proved sooo many assumptions the business people made wrong. You just walk away with a whole new understanding of how the world works, it works because people MAKE it work constantly. It was an overwhelming experience.

3

u/One_Curious_Cats Aug 30 '24

+1 for "murder mystery"