5 exercises — expressing uncertainty in bug reports, incident analyses, code reviews, and technical proposals.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A developer writes a bug report about an intermittent error. Choose the most professionally hedged statement:
Option B uses "might be caused by" (modal hedging) and "possibly" (adverbial hedging) to express that this is a hypothesis pending investigation, not a confirmed root cause. Professional bug reports hedge initial findings to avoid misleading readers. Over-confident statements (A and D) can waste engineering time. Option B also names the specific hypothesis while leaving room for other causes.
2 / 5
An incident report reads: "The spike in error rate _____ to increased latency on the upstream payment service." Choose the most appropriate hedged form:
"Appears to be due to" hedges the causal claim appropriately for a preliminary incident analysis. Post-mortems often move from hedged language early ("appears to be caused by") to confirmed language after investigation ("was caused by"). This distinction matters for legal, contractual, and professional reasons.
3 / 5
A team lead is reviewing proposed architecture. Choose the sentence that best hedges a concern without dismissing the proposal:
"May present" (modal hedging) combined with a specific condition ("once traffic exceeds...") makes the concern precise and professional. It signals a risk without asserting failure as certain. This is the standard register for code review and architecture review comments where you are flagging a potential issue, not declaring a definitive verdict.
4 / 5
Choose the best hedged phrase for a performance report where results are inconclusive:
"The results suggest that... may have contributed to... though" stacks multiple hedges appropriately for genuinely inconclusive data. "Suggest" (tentative reporting verb), "may have contributed" (modal perfect for uncertain past), and "though" (concessive clause) together signal honesty about measurement uncertainty — essential in performance engineering reports.
5 / 5
An engineer suspects a configuration issue. Which sentence demonstrates the best hedging for a Slack message to the ops team?
"It seems like" + "might have been" (modal perfect passive) expresses a hypothesis with appropriate uncertainty while including an actionable request ("could someone check"). This structure is ideal for collaborative troubleshooting: it shares a lead without asserting a conclusion, and the question keeps the conversation open.