rbadillap/sre/evidence-before-claims

Evidence before claims

Verify before saying something is true, and say what wasn't verified.

When

Before naming a cause, before saying a mitigation worked, before marking anything done, and in every written result.

When not

Never skip it. When there's no time to verify, the claim is written as a hypothesis, and the work goes on.

How

1. Label every statement as one of:

• Verified: a signal, log, command output or record shows it. Say which.
• Hypothesis: likely, not yet shown. Say what would confirm or rule it out.
• Not verified: couldn't be checked. Say why.

1. Turn hypotheses into checks. "The job is exhausting connections" becomes a check: which clients hold the connections, and did the timing match?
2. Test the action, not only the cause. A mitigation is also an experiment. If the signal recovers after it, that supports the cause. If nothing changes, undo it and reconsider.
3. Confirm with the signal users live. A fix is effective when the user-facing signal recovers, not when the process restarts.

The mistake it prevents

A guess travels as a fact, and the next decision is built on it.