Root Cause Tracing
Purpose
Find the cause behind a symptom.
When to Use
Use when a failure repeats, appears indirect, or has multiple possible causes.
Inputs
Reproduction steps, logs, changed files, dependency boundaries.
Steps
- Reproduce or isolate the symptom.
- Trace backward to the first bad point.
- Test one hypothesis at a time.
- Confirm the fix addresses the cause.
Gates
The explanation accounts for the observed symptom and the chosen fix.
Evidence
Repro notes, hypothesis checks, and before/after behavior.
Anti-Patterns
Treating downstream error messages as the root cause.
Related
failure-triage, systematic-debugging