Use Five Whys on a Flaky CI Failure
Apply Five Whys to identify and fix the root cause of a recurring GitHub Actions failure.
The api-integration GitHub Actions job intermittently fails with a duplicate email error. The team reruns it because the second run usually passes. Five Whys: keep asking why until the answer points to a durable fix The common trap is treating a green rerun as proof. A rerun proves only that the symptom did not happen this time. If the cause remains, the team has converted a defect into background noise, and the noise will return at the worst possible release moment. Why 1 Why did the job fail? The integration test created a duplicate user email. Start with the observed…
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