I found a good article in venture hacks for startup entrepreneurs. When you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. This article reminds us all the root causes are human problems even though it seems technical problems at first glance.
Let me introduce briefly how this process works. Let’s assume you found a defect, then you start asking why:
1. Why didn’t login module work? An user object became nil.
2. Why did an user object become nil? An object name was changed.
3. Why was an object name changed? So-and-so changed it while refactoring authorization module.
4. Why does his refactoring break an another module? Unit tests were not executed after refactoring.
5. Why were not unit tests executed? So-and-so was not trained to execute all the unit tests after refactoring.
After asking five why questions, make five corrections, which build a startup immune system. If you want to know more about five whys, please don’t miss to read the original article.
Tags: immune system, startup
