investigate

Root-cause analysis for software bugs is a disciplined, six-phase investigation process designed to methodically identify, reproduce, and resolve the underlying causes of engineering defects and performance issues.

To conduct a systematic bug investigation, you initiate a six-phase process by reproducing the issue and generating hypotheses, tracking each claim's provenance, source, method, and confidence metadata throughout the resolution workflow.

No, you do not need external debugging frameworks or dependencies to perform root-cause analysis. This investigation methodology operates independently with zero hard dependencies, requiring no additional tools to function.

The best way to track provenance during a bug investigation is using an Obsidian vault-based shared memory board with SPIFFE-inspired attestation, ensuring each claim is attributed with source, method, and confidence metadata.

Provenance tracking works during performance debugging by attributing every investigative claim with specific source, method, and confidence metadata, utilizing an evidence-driven approach to maintain a structured and auditable resolution path.

You should avoid a systematic six-phase debugging methodology for trivial, immediately obvious fixes where the overhead of structured hypothesis generation, provenance tracking, and attestation outweighs the complexity of the actual defect.