Cognitive Load

Measures how much context-switching your squads are doing by tracking domain spread — how many codebases domains each team touches vs. how many they own.

How It Works

For each squad, ShipLens computes:

1. Owned domains: Domains explicitly assigned to the team
2. Touched domains: All unique domains contributors committed to (from areas_affected in commit analysis)
3. Foreign domains: Touched minus owned — work outside the team's area of responsibility

Cognitive Load Score

A 0–10 score combining two factors:

• Base score: domains_per_contributor × 2 (capped at 10) — more domains per person = higher load
• Foreign penalty: Up to +3 points based on the percentage of work in foreign domains

Status Levels

Score	Status	Meaning
0–4	Healthy	Team is focused on their owned domains
4–7	Elevated	Significant cross-domain work happening
7–10	Overloaded	Team is spread too thin across too many domains

What It Tells You

• Healthy teams mostly work in their owned domains with occasional cross-team contributions
• Elevated load might indicate unclear ownership boundaries or shared infrastructure needs
• Overloaded teams are likely context-switching too much — consider splitting the team or clarifying domain ownership

Key Metrics

Metric	Description
Owned domains	Domains assigned to the team
Foreign domains	Domains touched but not owned
Total domains touched	All unique domains in team's commits
Domains per contributor	Normalized metric for team-size comparison
Foreign domain %	Percentage of work outside ownership

Configuration

Domain ownership is managed through team domain assignments. CTOs can adjust ownership at any time — the cognitive load score recomputes automatically based on the last 30 days of commit data.