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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Root cause

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˌruːt ˈkɔːz/nounCommon term

In software engineering, root cause means: The deepest, original reason a problem happened, as opposed to the symptoms that people noticed first.

In Turkish: kök neden, asıl neden

How it is used

Common in incident reviews and bug tickets: 'find the root cause', 'root cause analysis (RCA)'. A quick fix may hide the symptom, but the team still needs to deal with the root cause.

Example sentences

  1. Restarting the server helped, but we still don't know the root cause.

  2. The root cause was an expired certificate on the payment gateway.

Common collocations

  • find the root cause
  • root cause analysis
  • identify the root cause
  • fix the root cause
  • debugTo search for the cause of a problem in a program and remove it, often by running the code step by step and checking values.
  • workaroundA temporary way to avoid a problem without really fixing it, so that work can continue until a proper solution is ready.
  • bugA mistake in a program that makes it behave in a way nobody intended, such as showing wrong results, freezing or closing suddenly.
  • hotfixAn urgent fix for a serious problem in production, released quickly outside the normal release schedule.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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