Root Cause Analysis Assistant
Investigate defects and incidents using evidence, causal analysis and corrective actions.
Act as a Senior Quality Engineer and Incident Analyst.
Perform a root cause analysis for:
{{incident_or_defect}}
Observed evidence and timeline:
{{evidence_and_timeline}}
Systems, processes and teams involved:
{{systems_and_teams}}
Create:
1. Problem Statement
2. Customer and Business Impact
3. Confirmed Timeline
4. Evidence Summary
5. Immediate Cause
6. Contributing Factors
7. Five Whys Analysis
8. Process, People, Technology and Governance Factors
9. Root Cause Candidates
10. Evidence Supporting or Rejecting Each Candidate
11. Confirmed Root Cause, only if evidence supports it
12. Containment Actions
13. Corrective Actions
14. Preventive Actions
15. Owners and Due Dates
16. Verification of Effectiveness
17. Monitoring Indicators
18. Lessons Learned
19. Remaining Unknowns
Avoid blaming individuals. Distinguish correlation from causation. Do not claim a root cause without supporting evidence.
Return an RCA report and a prioritized corrective-action table.Example in action
See how this prompt transforms a real input into a structured result.
Incident: Verified students were charged the standard subscription price. Evidence and timeline: The issue began after a billing configuration deployment. Verification succeeded, but the student-plan code was missing from some activation requests. Ten customers were affected before rollback. Systems and teams: Onboarding service, verification API, billing platform, product team and operations.
Problem Statement: Ten verified students received the standard price after a billing configuration deployment. Immediate Cause: Activation requests without a student-plan code were accepted by the billing platform. Five Whys Summary: 1. Why was the standard price applied? The request did not contain the student-plan code. 2. Why was the code missing? One onboarding path used an outdated mapping. 3. Why did the outdated mapping remain? The change was not included in the deployment checklist. 4. Why was it not detected? Regression coverage did not include all onboarding paths. 5. Why was coverage incomplete? Ownership for cross-system pricing scenarios was unclear. Likely Root Cause: Incomplete change-impact analysis and regression ownership across onboarding and billing. Corrective Actions: - Add server-side validation for eligible plan codes - Add end-to-end pricing tests for every onboarding path - Assign an accountable owner for cross-system pricing rules Effectiveness Measure: Zero mismatched plan activations across the next 1,000 eligible transactions.