1. ©Seapine Software, Inc. All rights reserved. www.seapine.com1
As demands on product development teams increase and product complexity grows, it becomes
increasingly difficult to maintain quality while keeping costs down. This is especially true if the
same types of defects keep recurring across several development cycles. One of the most
effective ways to reduce development costs is finding the root causes of these defects and
taking corrective actions to fix them permanently.
Preventing Defects
with Root Cause Analysis

2. ©Seapine Software, Inc. All rights reserved. www.seapine.com2
My team just had an embarrassing quality issue
crop up in a recent release—one that we had
found and supposedly fixed in an earlier release.
I’m under the gun to not only make sure this issue
is resolved, but also to prove to upper management
that issues like this won’t happen in the future.
What action or processes can I use to help find
and correct defects like this and ensure they
stop recurring?
Q:

3. ©Seapine Software, Inc. All rights reserved. www.seapine.com3
Many product development teams employ root cause analysis (RCA) and root cause corrective
action (RCCA) to identify the true origin of defects in their development processes and prevent
them from recurring. RCA is a systematic process for categorizing and analyzing identified defects
that have occurred pre-release, post-release, or both. When done properly, RCA reveals the
points in the development process that are causing significant and recurring defects.
Root Cause Corrective Action (RCCA) is where you look at the analysis of problems during
RCA and put a corrective action in place, as far upstream in the process as possible. Catching
failures upstream saves rework, time, and money. The basic idea is you don’t simply put
a bandage on a mortal wound: you attempt to remove the cause of the wound putting some
type of corrective action in place (like wearing armor) to prevent the event from happening.
A critical piece of implementing the corrective action is to also plan for how you will assess
the effectivity of the correction. Without providing for this assessment, you won’t know if your
action corrected the underlying problem partially, completely, or not at all.
A:

4. ©Seapine Software, Inc. All rights reserved. www.seapine.com4
My team recently started conducting root cause
analysis on all P1 and P2 defects, but we’re finding
that the analysis and corrective action process is
taking
too much time given our already-hectic schedules.
I’m getting push back from my team as well as
upper
management, to either speed up the analysis cycle
or drop the practice entirely. I believe in the value of
RCA and don’t want to abandon it, I’m wondering if
there’s
a tool that could help us perform root cause
analysis faster?
Q:

5. ©Seapine Software, Inc. All rights reserved. www.seapine.com5
Many organizations use manual methods to perform root cause analyses, but automated tools
can help make the RCA process faster, while exposing gaps and errors that might otherwise have
been missed. An automated product development solution can reduce the amount of time spent
on RCA, RCCA, code reviews, and other quality improvement efforts. By automatically tracking the
product development data needed for process analysis, design for Six Sigma (DFSS), and similar
reports, such solutions can cut development costs while improving time to market.
Best suited for facilitating RCA and RCCA are product development solutions that give teams
the ability to define, capture, and follow the links between requirements and other project artifacts.
This can make the RCA process faster and easier, because the data needed to track a problem
to its root cause in the process is just a few clicks away. Such solutions also make it easy
to analyze the impact of corrective actions taken in response to a root cause analysis, as well
as automating traceability matrices and other key reports. You can easily analyze the impact
of corrective actions and continually evaluate their effectiveness as processes continue to change
and grow in complexity.
A:

6. ©Seapine Software, Inc. All rights reserved. www.seapine.com6
Learn More about RCA
and TestTrack
Download Seapine Software’s white
paper, “Using Root Cause Analysis
and TestTrack for Powerful Defect
Prevention,” to learn how TestTrack
makes the RCA process faster and
easier by putting vital data just a few
clicks away and automating traceability
matrices and other key reports. With
TestTrack, managers can easily analyze
the impact of corrective actions and
continually evaluate their effectiveness
as processes continue to change and
grow in complexity.
Download the white paper now.
About Seapine Software
With more than 8,500 customers worldwide, Seapine Software,
Inc. is a leading provider of process-centric product development
solutions. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, with offices in Europe,
Asia-Pacific, and Africa, Seapine’s development solutions help
organizations ensure the consistent release of high quality products,
while providing traceability, metrics and reporting, and compliance.
www.seapine.com