Root Cause Tracing

Root Cause Tracing

lubochka Updated

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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

  1. Reproduce or isolate the symptom.
  2. Trace backward to the first bad point.
  3. Test one hypothesis at a time.
  4. 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

lubochka/xiigen-general-skills/tree/main/skills/universal/root-cause-tracing commit d9587babe7

Frequently asked questions

npx skillmds@latest add lubochka/root-cause-tracing-3