We first discussed Kaizen in Chapter 2, Agile Software Delivery Methods and How They Fit the Manifesto. It is a Japanese word meaning "change for the better." It is commonly referenced as meaning "continuous improvement," and made famous through its incorporation in the Toyota Production System (TPS).
On the Toyota production lines, sometimes things go wrong. When they do, the station where the problem has occurred gets an allotted time to fix it. If they exceed the time buffer, there will be an impact on the rest of production, and they will need to stop the entire line. At this point, workers, including the managers, gather at the problem site to determine what seems to be the problem and what needs to be done to fix it.
All too often, when a problem occurs, we see the symptoms of the problem, and we try to fix it by fixing only the symptoms. More often than not, the cause of the problem goes deeper, and if we don't fix more than just the surface-level observations, it will occur again. So, if the production line starts up again in this situation, it won't be long before the problem recurs and it needs to be shut down once more.
To solve this problem, Toyota introduced Root Cause Analysis, which uses techniques for getting to the bottom of why something has happened. Two popular methods are Five Whys analysis and Ishikawa (Fishbone diagram).
I'll explain the simpler of these, Five Whys analysis, using a real-world example.
At my current place of work, we encourage our teams to take ownership of their deployments during production. This strategy doesn't come without risk, of course, and the teams do have a lot to learn in the DevOps space. Fortunately, we have coaches who work explicitly in this area, helping us come up-to-speed. Even so, sometimes the teams can be overly cautious.
That is why we introduced the concept of Fail Cake, inspired by a ThoughtWorks team who did something similar; we could see that we needed to encourage the team to take strategic risks if they were going to advance their learning.
Here is the story of Fail Cake and learning fast.