Comment by Waterluvian

The other day I said something along the lines of, "be interested in the class, not the instance" and I meant to try to articulate a sense of metaprogramming and metaanalysis of a problem.

Y is causing Z and we should fix that. But if we stop and study the problem, we might discover that X causes the class of Y problem so we can fix the entire class, not just the instance. And perhaps W causes the class of X issue. I find my job more and more being about how far up this causality tree can I reason, how confident am I about my findings, and how far up does it make business sense to address right now, later, or ever?