Minesweeper automates root cause analysis as a first-line defense against bugs

This post introduces Minesweeper, a new technique for automating root cause analysis (RCA) of bugs. It leverages sequential pattern mining on user event traces, comparing traces from users who encountered a bug (test group) with those who did not (control group). Statistical analysis of event patterns, using precision, recall, and F1-score, identifies the most distinctive patterns correlated with bugs. The system uses the PrefixSpan algorithm for efficient pattern mining and addresses usability challenges by avoiding redundant patterns. Minesweeper has demonstrated 85% accuracy in identifying root causes for tens of thousands of reports in minutes, significantly improving regression analysis and outage mitigation.