Five Whys

Definitions

1. A root cause analysis technique where you ask 'why?' five times to drill past symptoms to underlying causes. Originally from Toyota's production system. Works best for simple causal chains; for complex systems with multiple contributing factors, use more sophisticated techniques like fault trees or the Swiss cheese model.

   In plain English: Asking 'why?' five times in a row to dig past surface symptoms and find the real underlying cause of a problem.

   Example: "Why did the deploy fail? Bad config. Why bad config? Manual edit. Why manual? No automation. Why no automation? No time allocated. Why? Not prioritized. Root cause: missing investment in deploy tooling."

Related Terms

• Five Whys
• Retrospective
• Blameless Retrospective
• On-Call Rotation
• Rubber Stamp
• Incident Commander
• Definition of Done
• The Joel Test
• Release Checklist