Dragan Stepanović - Should we be having this problem in the first place?

Team Topologies have categorized 3 types of team cognitive load, as described here.

There’s one more category of cognitive load that I’m not sure they covered and it’s a cognitive load caused by the team’s high inventory.

A team can own a small piece of a domain but have a high cognitive load caused by the chocked flow, high inventory (too much WIP), delayed feedback, and lots of context switching.

It’s a cognitive load coming from a flawed process and lack of engineering practices that keep the inventory at a minimum (Slicing/TBD/TDD/Refactoring/Pairing/Mobbing).