Issue investigation

Debugging starts from a failing case. Investigation starts from a feeling that something is wrong, and its first job is to convert that feeling into a question sharp enough to answer.

Most investigations fail in one of two ways. They wander — collecting facts with no hypothesis, producing a pile of observations and no conclusion. Or they lock on early — the first plausible story becomes the answer and every later fact gets bent to fit it. The structure below exists to prevent both.

1. Turn the complaint into a measurement

"Slow" is not investigable. Find the number behind it, and the number that would settle it.

Ask: slow compared to what, measured where, for whom, since when? If nobody knows, that gap is your first finding — you cannot investigate what you cannot measure, and establishing the measurement is legitimate work.

Done when: you have a metric, a current value, and a value that would count as "fine".