DevOps: Learn from others

Interesting to read in my feed on Devops currently a discussion about DevOps and Root Cause Analysis. And I see people who state that the Root Cause Analysis is dead in our current days.

The people who declare the root cause analysis as outdated have the following arguments for it:

• there is no single root cause for a failure
• the current systems are in constant flux, so when you found the root cause the complex system has already been changed
• the procedure is a port mortem, and has grown into a blame game.

There are also a lot of people stating that the RCA should be adjusted. And I think I do agree with them. I should be an analysis focused on learning and not on blaming. And I do agree that it is an analysis that helps us understand the issue, so it should not be used once the issue has been resolved.

Perhaps we can learn something from the medical professionals use the differential diagnosis. And we can use the RCA to actually help all of us to build symptoms that will lead to a certain diagnosis and a proposed solution. In this manner we will learn from medicine and bring our profession up to a new level.

Interesting links: