The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Conclusion

Root cause analysis is a popular and successful technique for identifying ways to prevent defects. There are a variety of approaches to study unfortunate events in an effort to understand the low-level causes. Root cause analysis is an effective technique that can improve the software development process for an individual, a small team, or a large organization. Anyone can perform a root cause analysis, although the results will improve with the level of experience of the analyst.

Although there is typically no shortage of sentinel events—usually defects—to initiate a study, root cause analysis is not a technique that is a predictable investment in every software project. Some defects are more “important” than others are—whether they ...