Famous Five Why Analysis

In my last post, I described about “kaizen”, a continuous improvement process, but now the question is how we can introduce “kaizen”, in our lifes and partcularly in software development. Its always a great practice to review your work , either you are working in agile mode or some other other incremental approach, in some organizations, there are Post Project Report,or when we talk about agile , we have sprints and product owners often call for Sprint review meeting.

Five Why analysis is form of kaizen, it’s a technique of root cause anlaysis, it is a meeting of all stake holders , discussing critical issue faced during sprint or in project.

Lets suppose we faced a critical issue during sprint end while deploying our application to the production , the problem was that one of the key component was throwing exception on the server , but working fine in our environment with same code, team suffered a lot due to this issue ,suppose we solved the problem on priority basis, in order to complete our sprint, but now is the time to analyze about this issue using five why analysis

So

Why the component was not working in production environment?

The component was dependent upon the utility , whose files (Dll, EXE etc ) was not installed on the server.

Why it was not installed on the server?

During sever set up, team missed this utility, because it was not mentioned in the check list prepared for server set up.

Why it was not in the check list?

Because the respective code(utility) was not checked-in the code repository by the development team, and resource who preapred check-list, listed all componenets that were available on the Repository.

Why it was not checked in to the code repository?

Because developer did not push the utiliy to the code repository, and conducted unit tests on his machine,because he was not aware of that utility as well.

How testing team missed that dependency?

Because, the utility was already deployed to the QA server long time ago, so testing team was unaware of that utility.

So after these question,. We concluded that :

• There should be properly reviewed installation checklist for server set up.
• Before production, there should be a Pre-Production server, where Deployment team set envoirnment by taking with the code repository and executing checklist.

Its just an example, there are many scenarios, so just conducting a five why analysis at the end of each miles stones, we can reduce our gaps,if this practice continues, we can have our improvement process continue.

you can read more about five why form here