Tiger team

For the Court TV/TruTV television series based on a tiger team, see Tiger Team (TV series).

A tiger team is a group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems. The term may have originated in aerospace design but is also used in other settings, including information technology and emergency management.^{[citation needed]} According to a 1964 definition, "In case the term 'tiger team' is unfamiliar to you, it has been described as 'a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem.'"^[1]

A term used by Rockwell Collins for a roaming installation team. It is believed that they came up with the term "Tiger Team"

Security tiger teams

In security work, a tiger team is a specialized group that tests an organization's ability to protect its assets by attempting to circumvent, defeat, or otherwise thwart that organization's internal and external security. The term originated within the military to describe a team whose purpose is to penetrate security of "friendly" installations to test security measures.^{[citation needed]} It now more generally refers to any team that attacks a problem aggressively.^{[citation needed]}

Examples of tiger teams

1. The NSA Cyber Defense Tiger Team (Red Cell) is a tiger team that was created by the National Security Agency^[2]

2. Tiger Team, BAE Systems, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. International Fast Response Ship Repair team

3. Many tiger teams are informally constituted through managerial edicts. One of these was set up in NASA circa 1966 to solve the "Apollo Navigation Problem" and it makes an interesting story. The motivation was the discovery that current technology was unable to navigate Apollo at the level of precision mandated by the mission planners. Tests using radio tracking data from unmanned Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to evaluate circumlunar Apollo navigation were revealing errors of 2000 meters instead of the 200 that the mission required to safely land Apollo when descending from its lunar orbit. For example, Apollo astronauts were practicing landings in safe areas using the simulators at Houston. A tenfold increase in this error-bound implied a hundredfold increase in the target area, which then included unacceptably dangerous terrain. The mission was seriously at risk. This was a navigation problem and so five tiger teams were set up to find and correct the problem, one at each NASA center, from CalTech JPL in the west to Goddard SFC (GSFC) in the east. The Russians via Luna 10 were also well aware of this problem. There was an intentionally competitive aspect to this strategy, which was "won" by JPL in the spring of 1968 when it was shown that the problem was caused by the unexpectedly large local gravity anomalies on the moon arising from large ringed maria, mountain ranges and craters on the moon. This also led to the construction of the first detailed gravimetric map of a body other than the earth and the discovery of the lunar mass concentrations (Mascons).^[3]

See also

Software Testing portal

• Penetration test
• Red Cell US Navy SEAL Tiger Team
• Sneakers (1992)
• Tiger Team television show on Court TV (TruTV)

References

1. ^ J. R. Dempsey, W. A. Davis, A. S. Crossfield, and Walter C. Williams, "Program Management in Design and Development," in Third Annual Aerospace Reliability and Maintainability Conference, Society of Automotive Engineers, 1964, p. 7–8.
2. ^ NSA.gov
3. ^ Paul Muller and William Sjogren (1968). "Mascons: lunar mass concentrations". Science 161 (3842): 680–684. doi:10.1126/science.161.3842.680. PMID 17801458

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.