It's called "cognitive drift" and it's was a critical concern when I was working on medical imaging applications, there have been a number of studies on it incl

It's called "cognitive drift" and it's was a critical concern when I was working on medical imaging applications, there have been a number of studies on it including this google match http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23189449 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23189449 This is one of the main reasons I find unit testing productive. You can eliminate cognitive drift triggering startup delays in your unit testing framework easier than in your application.