Identifying the root cause of failures in IT changes: Novel strategies and trade-offs

Despite the Change and Problem Management have received significant attention from the academic community in recent years, the developed solutions do not identify the root cause of failures in IT Changes and, in some cases, only detect software failures. To address this, in this paper, we introduce four strategies to identify root cause of problems based on an interactive approach, in which the Diagnosis System questions a human operator. The strategies introduced and evaluated in this paper are built upon a system we have developed previously, but whose root cause identification was more rudimentary. A case study that uses the improved solution is conducted for the purpose of analyzing the diagnostics generated. Thus, it was possible to compare the diagnostics generated by each strategy, identifying any trends.