Root cause analysis

Root cause analysis is a method of problem solving used in science and reliability engineering to identify the root causes of faults or problems, so that the underlying factors causing an issue can be addressed rather than only its symptoms. It is used across information technology operations, manufacturing, telecommunications, industrial process control, accident investigation in aviation, rail and nuclear facilities, and medical diagnosis and epidemiology. The method combines inductive reasoning, developing theories from the evidence at hand, with deductive reasoning, testing those theories against further data, and generally follows a sequence of clearly describing the problem, establishing a timeline from normal operation to the problem occurrence, distinguishing root causes from other contributing factors, and mapping the causal relationships between the root causes and the problem. The international standard ISO/IEC 31010 lists techniques that can support root cause analysis, including the five whys, failure mode and effects analysis, fault tree analysis, Ishikawa diagrams and Pareto analysis, with the results typically feeding into a remediation process meant to prevent the problem from recurring. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/