Have you ever come across any of these?
- Stories that have a technical focus or you just don’t really understand why they’ve been asked for?
- The team have brought up something high level in the retrospective and you want to analyse why it occurred?
- There are continuous interruptions for your team members that are always ‘emergencies’ – but are they really, why are they occurring?
The 5 why’s technique is a root cause analyse technique that tries to quickly establish why something is really occurring and what the root causes are.
For example:
Problem – My team always gets interrupted over and over with emergencies during our Sprints
Why: Because management always escalate problems really quickly as emergencies
Why: Because problems are often very public and need fixing immediately
Why: Because the problems usually occur when real users are using the tool
Why: Because they use it in a way we don’t
Why: Because our testing suite doesn’t cover the necessary areas
So, in this example we’ve just gone from Sprint to Sprint interruptions to improving your testing infrastructure.
It’s surprising where this technique can take you. Try it and see…
