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Five whys: The startup immune system, Part 1 - Venture Hacks

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Saved by 4 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-11-14


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Summary: Whenever you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. Then make corrections at every level of the analysis. By applying five whys whenever you find a defect, you will (1) uncover the human problems beneath technical problems and (2) build an immune system for your startup.

Highlighted by joel

When something goes wrong, we tend to see it as a crisis and seek to blame. A better way is to see it as a learning opportunity. Not in the existential sense of general self-improvement. Instead, we can use the technique of asking why five times to get to the root cause of the problem and make corrections.

Highlighted by joel

  • Why was the website down? The CPU utilization on all our front-end servers went to 100%.
  • Why did the CPU usage spike? A new bit of code contained an infinite loop!
  • Why did that code get written? So-and-so made a mistake.
  • Why did his mistake get checked in? He didn’t write a unit test for the feature.
  • Why didn’t he write a unit test? He’s a new employee, and he was not properly trained in Test Driven Development (TDD).

    • Highlighted by joel

  • Bring the site back up.
  • Remove the bad code.
  • Help so-and-so understand why his code doesn’t work as written.
  • Train so-and-so in the principles of TDD.
  • Change the new engineer orientation to include TDD.

    • Highlighted by joel

    Making corrections builds your startup immune system.

    Highlighted by joel

    5 whys uncovers the human problems beneath technology problems.

    Highlighted by joel

    Make your corrections proportional to the cost of the defect.

    Highlighted by joel