Margaret-Anne Storey

A few weeks ago I talked about the Triple debt model at the University of Waterloo where Jesse Hoey saw an interesting connection from the triple debt model to Peirce’s semiotic triadic model developed in the 19th century.

In my last post, I described how a small agile or startup project can have low cognitive debt (where everyone has a good understanding about the goals of the project and what we are doing) but high intent debt (nothing is documented for future team members or agents to refer...

The Missing Stop Sign Throughout Ireland where I grew up, it was common to encounter intersections with no stop sign. The locals knew which car (or tractor!) had the right of way. And things were generally ok. Until a driver from out of town shows up! I’ve been thinking about...

A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared understanding of how and why that system works and can be changed over time. The post sparked thoughtful...

The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time. Technical debt nicely captures that “human understanding” also matters, but the words “technical debt” conjure up the...