Meaningful RCAs: Why they are valuable

Software development is tricky. It can involve complicated tools, languages, domain spaces and a variety of teams & roles. The world in which we work is constantly changing and evolving and we need to adapt. On top of that, knowing best working practices isn’t instinctive like shark hunting or bird migration patterns. We need to learn. Just because your ways of working was fine on one project, it doesn’t mean it’ll work on the next or in a new scenario.

We all know about the idea of learning from mistakes.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing” — Henry Ford 

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery” — James Joyce

Within the world of software, arguably the best was to learn from our mistakes is through root cause analysis of escalations or high priority / worrying defects. Whilst some people may have done RCAs to conclude “missing test case” or “incorrect null handling”, meaningful RCAs are about learning why we made the mistakes and what we can do to avoid them… because this won’t be the last time that we miss test cases and incorrectly handle null.

Over my next few blog posts I’ll share how we can go about running meaningful RCAs to help us improve our ways of working to allow us to avoid being bitten twice and help build better quality software.

For more on RCAs, you can find a summary of what I’ve shared on my Meaningful RCA page.