Mental models
summary
Two years of observational research of DevOps outage responses shows that expertise looks like admitting gaps not bluffing; teams that say “I didn't know it worked that way” and intentionally combine diverse perspectives detect and repair failures faster. The paper documents mental model use and decay, ties behavior to design affordances, and links findings to other high‑consequence domains; see Stella.report for methods and examples of squads that rebuilt a shared model after surprise failures where mental models go stale.
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