BoardSnap is an iOS app that reads a root cause analysis whiteboard — problem statement, causal chain, evidence, and corrective actions — and produces a structured RCA report in one snap.
Root cause analysis is a discipline, not a conversation. It requires defining the problem precisely, gathering evidence, tracing a specific causal chain, and arriving at a root cause that is both real and actionable. The whiteboard is where the causal chain gets traced — each step connecting the observable problem to the underlying cause that must be addressed.
The RCA board often looks like a chain of boxes and arrows — 'System outage → database connection exhausted → connection pool not tuned → high traffic not anticipated → no capacity planning process.' Each box represents a real event or condition, and each arrow represents a causal relationship that must be supported by evidence.
Without a documented RCA, incidents repeat. The causal chain traced in one post-mortem session exists only in the memory of the people in the room. The next time the same failure mode appears, the team goes through the same investigation again. An RCA report that lives in the team's incident documentation prevents that repetition.
Top of the board. Specific and measurable: 'Service outage from 14:32 to 15:19 UTC on April 26, affecting 3,400 users.' Include the impact in business terms. The problem statement bounds the analysis — everything on the board must relate to this specific event.
Draw a horizontal chain of boxes from right (the observable problem) to left (the root cause). Each box is an event or condition. Each arrow represents 'caused by.' The chain should be five to eight links — fewer usually means you stopped too early; more usually means you branched into multiple causes.
Next to each arrow, write the evidence that supports the causal relationship. Log line, metric value, config setting — whatever proves the link. Unsupported causal links are hypotheses, not findings. Label hypotheses separately.
The leftmost box in the chain is the root cause — the point where a corrective action would break the causal chain permanently. Draw a double circle around it or use a red marker. This is the most important box on the board.
Not every cause is in the main causal chain. Write contributing factors in a separate section — conditions that made the problem worse but didn't initiate the chain. These inform the corrective actions without cluttering the main analysis.
For the root cause and each major contributing factor, write one or two corrective actions: what will be done, by whom, and by when. Corrective actions without owners and dates are intentions, not commitments.
Open BoardSnap. The RCA board has a problem statement, a causal chain with evidence, a circled root cause, contributing factors, and corrective actions. BoardSnap AI reads the chain structure and the circled root cause marker.
A structured RCA report with: problem statement, causal chain described as a numbered sequence, evidence notes at each link, root cause clearly identified, contributing factors as a separate list, and corrective actions with owners. The report is formatted for an incident post-mortem doc or a process improvement record. Paste it directly into your incident management system.
The on-call team ran an RCA after a 47-minute outage. Six boxes in the causal chain, four supported by log evidence, two by config file review. The root cause was a missing retry limit in the message queue consumer. BoardSnap read the chain and produced the RCA report, which went into the team's incident docs within an hour of the session.
A production team ran an RCA on a recurring product defect. The causal chain traced through five steps from defect observation to a calibration procedure that was being skipped. BoardSnap's output became the corrective action report submitted to the quality management system.
A SaaS company ran an RCA on a churn spike using the same technique — causal chain from 'churn increased 4x in March' back to a pricing change that broke an implicit expectation for existing customers. BoardSnap captured the analysis. The corrective action was a grandfathering policy implemented within two weeks.
Yes. The Five Whys is a specific technique for tracing a causal chain — it's one method for building the chain in the RCA. Draw the causal chain using the Five Whys method and label each box with the 'Why?' question it answers. BoardSnap reads both the chain structure and the question labels.
For problems with multiple root causes, draw the main chain and use branching arrows where the chain splits into parallel causes. Each branch leads to a separate root cause box — circle each one. BoardSnap reads branching chains and describes each path separately in the output.
BoardSnap produces text output. Copy the corrective actions from the output and paste them into Jira as tickets or PagerDuty as follow-up actions. The structured format makes this a copy-paste operation, not a rewrite.
Snap the board, ship the action items in ten seconds.