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What does "root cause" mean in programming?
root cause is one of the most common terms in software development. This guide explains what it means, how it is used in practice, and why it matters, with real examples from the developer world.
Definition
The underlying, fundamental reason a bug or failure occurred. Fixing a symptom without addressing the root cause means the problem will likely reappear. Root cause analysis (RCA) is a structured approach to finding it.
Example
"The root cause of the outage was a misconfigured load balancer, not the application code."
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