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| Criterion |  Engineering Fault Isolation |  Engineering Hypothesis-Driven Troubleshooting |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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 systems fail unexpectedly, spontaneous attempts often produce more noise than insight. Hypothesis-driven Troubleshooting translates symptoms into testable assumptions and makes troubleshooting learnable. | 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. | Plans often contain assumptions that were never openly stated and remain dangerous precisely because of that. Assumption Surfacing makes these silent premises visible and prioritizes which of them carry the initiative or could sink it. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Medium | Low | Low |
Timedifferent | 30-180 min | 30-240 min | 20–45 min | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 1-6 | 1-6 | Small cross-functional group | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Fault Isolation Map, Test Log, Excluded Hypotheses, Narrowed Fault Area | Hypothesis Log, Test Plan, Evidence Notes, Diagnosis Summary | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | TroubleshootingDiagnosisEngineering | TroubleshootingProblem solvingDiagnosis | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |