

Ask HN: What is the word? - cs2010

A coworker suggested that there is an engineering term that describes a decline in quality (in a product or process) to a point where there can never be a recovery to the initial state.  Anyone know what the term might be?
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gaius
I use "incident pit" for this.

This is a concept from SCUBA diving, imagine a slope that starts off shallow
on the left hand side of a graph and becomes exponentially steeper as you go
right. The horizontal axis is what has just gone wrong. The vertical axis is
how much trouble you're in.

So over at the left hand side of the graph, something major can go wrong
(moving you quite far to the right) but it doesn't move you very far
vertically, so you're OK. The further to right you get, the smaller the
movement to the right it takes to increase your trouble by the same amount. At
the point where the graph gets asymptotic, a tiny movement to the right - an
otherwise trivial thing going a tiny bit wrong - is enough to push you off the
scale (i.e. you're dead).

The trap is that you can't see yourself falling into the pit, because it
appears early on that problems aren't having a significant effect. This leads
to overconfidence. Then once you're in the pit, it becomes harder and harder
to get back out again (i.e. you need a huge vertical movement for a small
horizontal movement back to the left). An experienced diver is hypersensitive
and this is why you will see people abandon a dive for a seemingly trivial
matter - they've felt themselves at the top of an incident pit.

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retroafroman
FUBAR is very casual (and probably inappropriate) acronym from the military
that means what you are looking for.

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cs2010
LOL - have heard that one before... not a bad match. I was hoping for one that
might qualify in buzzword bingo like "irrecoverable declination." It would be
nice to be able to capture the idea to encourage ongoing vigilance in quality
(rather than simply "fixing it later").

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retroafroman
There is a pretty commonly used term in manufacturing for "ongoing vigilance
in quality" which is the Japanese word kaizen. It means continual improvement
(at least in American manufacturing companies, not sure about original
Japanese).

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jefffoster
My favourite is "you can't polish a turd" though I don't think it really
qualifies as an engineering term!

