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Criterion
Paper illustration for Fault Isolation.
Engineering
Fault Isolation
Paper illustration of a calm four-quadrant Assumption Map with hypothesis cards and emphasis on important assumptions with little evidence.
Product Discovery
Assumption Mapping
A hypothetical failure makes concrete risks, signals, and fitting mitigations visible.
Decision Making
Pre-Mortem
Design sheets and interface cards connect to jointly written pseudocode with highlighted unresolved questions.
Architecture
ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)
Purposedifferent
In technical failures, the visible symptom often gets mixed up with the actual cause. Fault Isolation narrows the fault space and progressively reduces which part of the system is truly affected.When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first.In early initiatives with many uncertainties, planning quickly turns too optimistic. A pre-mortem makes the expected failure visible in advance and sharpens the view of causes, gaps, and countermeasures.ARID examines how well developers can work with a technical design. It focuses on a part of the system that can still be revised, between the architecture overview and the detailed specification.
Complexitydifferent
MediumMediumLowMedium
Timedifferent
30-180 min45-60 min20–45 min2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional
Participantsdifferent
1-62-8Small cross-functional groupDesigners, developers as users, and facilitation
Formatdifferent
Workshop + asyncWorkshop + asyncWorkshopWorkshop + async
Outputdifferent
Fault Isolation Map, Test Log, Excluded Hypotheses, Narrowed Fault AreaAssumption map, Test backlog, Risk rankingRisk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption logPrioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions
Tagsno overlap
TroubleshootingDiagnosisEngineering
AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation
RiskDecisionFailurePlanning
ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks
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