---
title: "Root-cause analysis (RCA)"
description: "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 and blameless post-mortems, and codes each confirmed…"
canonical: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/root-cause-analysis-rca
author: "Jorge García Aibar"
license: "CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)"
doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197
version: "0.5.0"
updated: 2026-09-24
---

# Root-cause analysis (RCA)

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](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/incidents#root-cause-analysis)
- Chapters: [ch. 17, Incidents](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/incidents)
- In the glossary chapter: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/glossary#t-root-cause-analysis-rca

## Sources

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