What is five-whys-analysis?

A guided method for finding the underlying cause of a problem by asking “why?” repeatedly, usually five times. It records the reasoning, checks its quality, and supports countermeasures, which are actions intended to prevent the problem from returning.

Use it for recurring defects, failures, troubleshooting, and other root-cause investigations. It can also create a professional analysis report.

It helps move beyond visible symptoms to causes that can be addressed. The guided questions and scoring reduce guesswork during investigations.

five-whys-analysis — Plugin by ddunnock

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add ddunnock/claude-plugins

agentmods

npx agentmods add plugins/ddunnock/claude-plugins/five-whys-analysis

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ddunnock/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session not measured What this adds to a session before it is invoked.

When invoked not measured Not applicable: nothing here is loaded into a session.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Security

Grade A, and why

five-whys-analysis scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/five-whys-analysis/.claude-plugin/plugin.json · 9 lines

What it actually says

{
  "name": "five-whys-analysis",
  "description": "Conduct rigorous 5 Whys root cause analysis with guided questioning, quality scoring, and professional report generation. Use when performing root cause analysis, investigating problems, conducting 5 Whys sessions, troubleshooting recurring issues, or when user mentions \"5 whys\", \"root cause\", \"why did this happen\", \"find the cause\", or needs to identify underlying causes of defects, failures, or process problems. Includes validation tests, scoring rubric, and countermeasure development.",
  "version": "1.0.1",
  "author": {
    "name": "dunnock"
  },
  "keywords": ["5-whys", "root-cause", "root-cause-analysis", "rca", "problem-solving", "quality"]
}

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2d ago First seen · 9 lines scan A efd706d74896

Subscribe to this mod's changes

five-whys-analysis is a plugin published in the GitHub repository ddunnock/claude-plugins (12 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. Its token cost is not measured: this kind of file is read by the harness, not the model. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Debugging Research

five-whys-analysis

Getting it into your agent

Grade A, and why

Nothing flagged

What it actually says

What this file has done since we first saw it

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