Communicating too much

This section will explore what happens when you communicate too much in a technical context. To do this, we will start by exploring an anti-pattern taken straight out of cognitive psychology: cognitive overload.

Cognitive overload

Cognitive overload happens when the amount of information presented becomes overwhelming to the recipient to the extent that it impairs action.

Example

LilacCo, the world’s leading producer of scented candles, is having major issues with its integration landscape. It has a relatively recently purchased MuleSoft platform, but it has seen little use, and most integrations still run through legacy middleware or point-to-point.

Martin is a technical architect who has been given the task to come up with a solution to the various issues LilacCo is experiencing. The issues include high latency and slow performance on many integrations, poor logging and monitoring, long and error-prone development cycles, and the inability...