n 1 What sysadmins have to do to correct sudden operational problems An opposite of hacking "Been hacking your new newsreader?" "No, a power glitch hosed the network and I spent the whole afternoon fighting fires " 2 The act of throwing lots of manpower and late nights at a project, esp to get it out before deadline See also {gang bang}, {Mongolian Hordes technique}; however, the term `firefighting' connotes that the effort is going into chasing bugs rather than adding features
An unplanned diversion of scarce resources, and the reassignment of some of them to fix problems discovered late in a product's development cycle (See Repenning, JPIM, September 2001)