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Root-cause analysis (RCA)

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The review that answers why an incident happened and why the controls did not stop it, using techniques such as five whys, fault tree analysis 1 and blameless post-mortems, and codes each confirmed cause against a taxonomy that names the control that should have caught it.

Developed in
ch. 17, Root-cause analysis
Chapters
ch. 17, Incidents
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

3 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Blameless post-mortem

    An incident review that identifies contributing causes without indicting any individual or team, on the premise that people acted reasonably on what they knew…

Sources

  1. [1] IEC 61025:2006, Fault tree analysis (FTA) (edition 2.0). IEC. 2006-12-13. https://webstore.iec.ch/en/publication/4311 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Root-cause analysis (RCA). In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/root-cause-analysis-rca. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026rootcauseanalysisrca,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Root-cause analysis (RCA)}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/root-cause-analysis-rca}
}