Architecture & practice·Incidents and what happens after
the report named one cause, and three of the people who were there could each name a different one.
Root cause
Also calledroot cause analysis, RCA
The single underlying reason a failure occurred — a framing borrowed from mechanical systems that fits software poorly. Complex systems fail through combinations, so the search for one cause usually stops at the most recent human action, which is the least useful place to stop. Reviews that ask what conditions made the failure possible produce better actions than ones that ask what the root cause was.