One post tagged with "context-switching"

Your senior developer is assigned to three projects. You assume they're giving each project a third of their time. Gerald Weinberg calculated the real math in Quality Software Management (1992): with three concurrent projects, each project gets about 20% of a developer's time — and the remaining 40% evaporates into context switching overhead.

This isn't speculation. It's a well-documented cognitive phenomenon, confirmed by our platform data across B2B engineering teams and consistent with Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine showing 23 minutes of recovery time per interruption. Context switching is one of the most expensive invisible costs in software engineering.