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When I was at AWS, when we did postmortems on incidents we called it "root cause analysis", but it was understood by everyone that most incidents are multicausa
by Analemma_ 11mo ago
When I was at AWS, when we did postmortems on incidents we called it "root cause analysis", but it was understood by everyone that most incidents are multicausal and the actual analyses always ended up being fishbone diagrams.
Probably there are some teams which don't do this and really do treat RCA as trying to find a sole root cause, but I think a lot of "getting mad at RCA" is bikeshedding the terminology, and nothing to do with the actual practice.
- tptacek 11mo agoRight, I'm not a semantic zealot on this point, but the post we're commenting on really does suggest that the Cloudflare incident had a root cause in basic database management failures, which is the substantive issue the root-cause-haters have with the term.
- otterley 11mo agoThe layered-swiss-cheese model of understanding incidents tends to map to the real world better than the alternatives.
- cyberax 11mo ago> to find a sole root cause "Six billion years ago the dust around the young Sun coalesced into planets"
- luhn 11mo ago"Workaround: If we wait long enough, the earth will eventually be consumed by the sun." https://xkcd.com/1822/ https://xkcd.com/1822/
- otterley 11mo agoThese days we tend to spend more time thinking about the "5 whys" (which often turn into more than 5) than the root cause itself. It's much more productive and useful.