“One of the most overlooked hidden costs and long-term risks on software projects is the rising cognitive cost of troubleshooting. As software systems evolve, they often grow in complexity—accumulating dependencies, behaviors, and design decisions that can become harder to reason about over time. Maintaining a system requires that developers can make sense of unexpected behavior when it occurs.”
Giving Developers Words to Explain What's Happening When Software Gets Out of Control
The lack of visibility and difficulty of quantifying the challenges make it hard to communicate the severity of the situation to management, which often prevents the investment of time and resources in improvements.