Tracing a problem back to the underlying cause rather than its symptoms, so the fix stops it happening again.
Good work shows: Asks why until a fixable cause appears; backs each step with evidence; proposes a fix aimed at the cause.
Root cause analysis is one of the analysis skills on FinderK.
The job simulations and Skill Paths below include work that is checked for this skill. You do the work in an original fictional company and get feedback on it.
Customers could not pay for about an hour and a half on a busy Saturday. Rebuild the timeline and impact from the logs, write a blameless review that fixes conditions rather than people, book the review and brief customer care without promising what you cannot keep.
Skills: Reconstruct an incident timeline from logs and records; Measure customer impact and error budget use; Write a blameless review that names conditions, not people; Turn contributing factors into owned actions; Brief non-engineers honestly about an incident
A colleague's change will issue partial refunds to thousands of festival customers, and all its tests pass because they check the code against itself. Work out the right refunds from the finance policy, review the change, and hold the line on a money bug when the release date is used as pressure.
Skills: Check code against the rule it implements, not its own tests; Work out expected money values exactly from a policy; Write review comments an author can act on; Hold a safety decision under release pressure
Environmental compliance officer at Halbrook Dairies
About 75 minutes. Included in Plus.
A monthly ammonia result is above the permit limit. Decide whether the permit has actually been breached, get a notification signed before the clock runs out, and handle a report of dead fish downstream without guessing or denying.
Skills: Assess compliance against a permit's statistical limits; Separate records from what people remember; Meet a legal notification deadline under pressure; Report facts without speculating about cause; Handle a public pollution report within the rules