Five Whys
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
The Five Why technique dives into the heart of a problem by discovering root causes and explore possible fixes by asking 'why' 5 times in a row.
Example from Eric Ries:
Let's say you notice that your website is down. Obviously, your first priority is to get it back up. But as soon as the crisis is past, you have the discipline to have a post-mortem in which you start asking why:
- why was the website down? The CPU utilization on all our front-end servers went to 100%
- why did the CPU usage spike? A new bit of code contained an infinite loop!
- why did that code get written? So-and-so made a mistake
- why did his mistake get checked in? He didn't write a unit test for the feature
- why didn't he write a unit test? He's a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD
See: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/07/how-to-conduct-five-whys-root-cause.html
