Talk:Tiger team

Citations are not optional
I have today removed most of this article as it appears to be almost entirely personal belief or recollection. One citation does not provide original history or evidence that the term is used anywhere other than in one NSA exercise. Indeed, the most common current usage I can find of the term is ironical, in the Dilbert comic strip. I'll refrain from updating the article with that tone while we find references for sincere military / security usage, and the term's history. Rogerborg (talk) 08:25, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Indeed, the term was used during my Navy enlistment but not in the NSA context. I believe it referred to a temporary, ad-hoc committee or team of members with different backgrounds or specialties, working together on a problem. Like many words and phrases that arise from military service, it may prove difficult to track down its origin. Mark Turner (talk)     15:02, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

New Comment: I feel this new topic in Wikipedia is valuable. Indeed, it was cited in an article in the Guardian of 15 01 11. To that end I have entered a second Tiger Team story, and hope that others may well be inspired to extend this list. It could, in my view, become an interesting archive in its own right. Member: Paul M Muller PhD (mullerpaulm).

Origin and early history
I used Google's N-Gram Viewer tool to hunt down a 1964 definition of "tiger team" in the Google Books corpus. This may be a fruitful approach to get closer to the origins of a term. I revised the article to reflect its early appearance in aerospace (perhaps military) troubleshooting; I believe the security usage of the term came later. --Beamjockey (talk) 19:11, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Two claims have recently appeared:

1. ''A term used by Rockwell Collins for a roaming installation team. It is believed that they came up with the term "Tiger Team."'' Since we already have a documented usage of the term from 1964, and Rockwell Collins did not exist under that name in 1964, this needs to be supported by a stronger statement than "It is believed that..."

2. A United States Army acronym standing for "T"echnical "I"ntegration "G"roup "E"ngaged in "R"esearch believed to be coined by a member of the Headquarters, Department of the Army Staff in the early 1970s. Again, this cannot be the earliest usage, and it needs to be documented. This may possibly be an example of a "backronym," where a word is already in common use and someone thinks up a (vaguely) plausible phrase to make an acronym out of it. Beamjockey (talk) 14:18, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Merge with Red Team proposal
Oppose merge Tiger Team with Red Team. Red Team is not equivalent to Tiger Team. Red Team is an opposition force during war-game exercises (to oppose a "blue team"). Additionally, "red teaming" an idea is akin to attempting to disprove said idea. Source: Micah Zenko, "Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy", New York, NY:Basic Books 2015 My understanding of "Tiger Team" is that is it a team put together to trial a new concept or idea, to eventually report back on how well something worked. Source: Work Experience Arkraven000 (talk) 13:21, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

"Red Team" and "Tiger team" have distinct connotations and usages. I do not think that merging would be appropriate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.204.202.184 (talk) 16:16, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Oppose merge Tiger Team with Red Team. A Tiger Team appears to be a generalized troubleshooting team, rather than an OPFOR-style Red Team. These are sufficiently different to warrant distinct articles.

* Septegram * Talk * Contributions * 05:20, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

"Pro-Merge." Unless someone can articulate 1) How "Tiger Team" is fundamentally different than "Red Team," and 2) Why "Tiger Team" is notable enough to deserve its own page, rather than existing as an anecdotal subheading on the "Red Team" page. (And hopefully that person will articulate both points with one or more sources). Reasoning:  I've worked in InfoSec/ITsec/*sec for nearly a decade… but I only just encountered the term "Tiger Team" for the first time a few minutes ago… and that was by seeing the link to this page in the "See Also" box, under the Red Team article.
 * 1) # #Johnfromtheprarie (talk) 23:04, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Oppose merging Tiger Team with Red Team. There are two meanings here. The older one is "expert troubleshooters temporarily working on a problem." The other and more recent meaning is "experts who behave like adversaries to probe security," sometimes in a military context but very often in a computer-security context. As one can learn from the reference, already in the article, to the 1964 publication by J.R. Dempsey et al, "tiger teams" were active in the aerospace industry, the military, and NASA in the early 1960s. For a further example, see James R. Hansen, writing in 1995 about a 1963 crisis in NASA's Scout rocket program:

[In 1963] "The Scout team decided that a 14-month reliability improvement program to recertify the rocket was needed. The effort was spearheaded by a NASA/LTV/air force 'tiger team,' whose mission was 'to revise completely how [the project office] handled the vehicle and to standardize the process to the ultimate degree.' The tiger team concept, which in essence was a technological commando squad, had already proved effective in industrial settings. NASA was beginning to use it more frequently in the 1960s to attack particularly troublesome problems." (James R. Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, NASA History Office SP-4308, 1995, p. 214-215.)

Another aerospace example is given in the article: the Project Apollo tiger team convened to deal with the problem of lunar mascons. The origin of "tiger team" is unclear, until someone nails down a suitable reference, but to me it appears to have come from the military, probably military aviation, in the 1950s, and spread widely through government and multiple industries.

In 1991, we see the civilian U.S. Department of Energy dispatching a tiger team: "Fifty health, safety and environmental experts -- a 'Tiger Team' sent by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) -- arrived Oct. 7 to inspect the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). The experts are looking for ways to improve the laboratories' safety, environmental protection and waste management procedures."

More recently, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also created a tiger team to deal with a crisis: "Part of the reason was the VA assigned 'tiger teams' of clerical staff to process the oldest claims filed by the oldest veterans."

Neither the rocket engineers, nor the laboratory safety experts, nor the team of elite clerical staff parachuting into the VA's warehouse of claims files, can be said to be a "Red Team" pretending to be adversaries.

The second, adversarial sense of "tiger team" goes back surprisingly far in the history of computing. Here's a 1976 reference: C. Richard Attanasio, Peter W. Markstein, Ray J. Phillips, "Penetrating an Operating System: A Study of VM/370 Integrity," IBM Systems Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 102-116, 1976:

"An alternative approach is to use tiger teams, who are experts in the security domain, to try to compromise a target system, and evaluate the system’s security based on the attacks."

I hope I am persuasive in showing both that that "tiger team" is a venerable term in wide use and that it is sometimes, but not always, a synonym for "Red Team." I welcome Johnfromtheprarie's vigilance and, since he has just learned the term, I congratulate him on being among today's lucky ten thousand. Beamjockey (talk) 23:33, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Pro Merge of Tiger Team with Red Team. I think the primary differences between a Red Team and a Tiger Team are mostly temporal. Red Teams tend to have more persistence whereas Tiger Teams are generally ad-hoc, single-use based projects that go away and may never return after the original goal is complete. A red team is essentially just a tiger team that operates indefinitely or intermittently for a similar purpose; basically a perpetuation of a tiger team. If I tasked a tiger team with the goal of discovering vulnerabilities in my organization, didn't the tiger team just become the red team? Aren't the only differences the perpetuity and the adversarial nature of the task? The tiger team article could easily work as a section within the red team article, perhaps with a redirect to that particular red team section when using 'tiger team' in a search. I don't mean to say they're both always synonyms but I think they're definitely similar enough concepts to not each require their own pages. Kajisav (talk) 05:01, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Examples section seems overly intricate and poorly sourced
Specifically the latter "Many tiger teams are informally constituted through managerial edicts" section, regarding NASA and an Apollo incident. There is way too much detail of questionable relevance to understanding the concept of a tiger team and the details are largely without references. I feel the second example of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) making ad-hoc tiger teams for troubleshooting specific problems is enough detail that this additional detailed section can be removed, so I removed it. Kajisav (talk) 04:23, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

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