https://www.dotnetzone.gr:443/cs/blogs/pkanavos/archive/2006/12/04/21672.aspxSounds familiar? The customer reports a problem that can't be reproduced. No errors were logged and no error messages generated. No-one can go to the customer's site for at least a day. All we have to work with are the symptoms reported by the customerelCommunityServer 2.1 SP3 (Build: 20423.1)https://www.dotnetzone.gr:443/cs/blogs/pkanavos/archive/2006/12/04/21672.aspx#21735Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:11:22 GMT2622095e-976c-431a-859e-16783ec7ecd7:21735capAlthought the cause and effect diagram consists a very interesting approach to such hard-to-trace problems, I have found using Mind Manager (<a rel="nofollow" target="_new" href="http://www.mindjet.com/eu/">http://www.mindjet.com/eu/</a>) also particularly useful for problem cause identification. The difference is that in Mind Manager the design starts from a central point (something like the body of a spider) and then expands to branches (&quot;spider legs&quot;) which can also have their own sub-branches and so forth. So what I usually did was to type in the problem in the central box and start making branches representing possible causes. The idea, though, is similar to the fishbone diagram.https://www.dotnetzone.gr:443/cs/blogs/pkanavos/archive/2006/12/04/21672.aspx#21859Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:38:55 GMT2622095e-976c-431a-859e-16783ec7ecd7:21859Παναγιώτης ΚαναβόςThe fishbone shows a sequence of events that can't be shown with a mind map. Although this isn't much usefull when brainstorming, it can be usefull when troubleshooting code. Apart from that, both tools do basically the same job. <br>In any case, I prefer to use paper diagrams instead of tools for quick diagrams because it's a lot easier to add extra info that isn't easily depicted with a tool, e.g. draw lines that connect causes/functions to common error handling code.