Expressing Degrees of Certainty in IT Communication
5 exercises — use appropriate certainty language in incident reports, post-mortems, and technical investigations.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
In an incident report at the investigation stage, which phrasing is most appropriate for an unconfirmed root cause?
"Appears to be" signals a conclusion based on evidence but not yet confirmed — appropriate during investigation. Options A and B assert certainty prematurely; in a live incident, this can mislead responders if the assumption is wrong. Option D claims the opposite without evidence. Good incident reports hedge until root cause is verified: "appears to be," "seems to be," "may be related to." Overclaiming certainty during investigation is a common professional communication error.
2 / 5
The deployment succeeded, but latency ___ increased since the update was pushed. Choose the most precise hedged phrasing.
"Has likely increased" expresses a probable conclusion drawn from current evidence. "Is definitely" overclaims. "Might have possibly" is redundant double hedging — choose one hedge word. "Will have increased" expresses a future perfect or logical conclusion, which is too strong here without confirmation. In SRE and DevOps communication, "has likely" and "appears to have" are standard calibrated phrasing for probable but unconfirmed observations.
3 / 5
The service ___ experience intermittent timeouts if the connection pool is not increased before the traffic spike.
"Might" expresses possibility — appropriate when predicting a future risk that depends on conditions. "Will definitely" overclaims certainty about future behaviour. "Is" (present tense) does not fit the conditional future context. "Has" is past tense and irrelevant here. In capacity planning and risk assessments, "might," "could," and "may" are appropriate for conditional predictions: "the service might experience timeouts if..." signals a risk without overstating certainty.
4 / 5
Which sentence best expresses HIGH confidence in a post-mortem report after the root cause is confirmed?
In a completed post-mortem where the root cause is confirmed, plain past tense ("was caused by") is the correct register — no hedging needed. Options A and B are appropriate during investigation, not in a finalised report. Option D ("appears to have been") still hedges, which would undermine confidence in a confirmed finding. The principle: match your certainty language to your evidence level. Hedging when you have confirmed data appears evasive.
5 / 5
We ___ a connection between the deployment and the spike in error rates, but we need more data to confirm.
"Suspect" is a precise calibrated verb in technical investigation: "we suspect a connection" conveys a hypothesis based on correlation but not yet established causation. Other useful hypothesis verbs: "believe," "hypothesise," "theorise." "Have confirmed" claims certainty we do not have. "Deny" means the opposite. "Know" is too strong without confirmation. The distinction between "suspect" and "confirm" is professionally significant in incident communication.