For me, when I talk about "root cause", what I mean is: What is the most generic thing, that, if changed, would have prevented that problem? Generic things ar

For me, when I talk about "root cause", what I mean is: What is the most generic thing, that, if changed, would have prevented that problem? Generic things are: Team setup, planning process, development process, choice of framework and programming languages, coding conventions, ... Less generic things are: Database constraints, ORM validation, ... Even less generic: Server side API validation, frontend validation, a frontend bug that caused a bad value to be submitted, ... From this comparison it is clear that all levels of genericness have to be correct and need to be fixed if necessary. The question for the root cause simply encourages to follow the lead all the way up the chain of genericness.