refailure

Refailure is a term used in reliability, risk management, and organizational performance to describe the recurrence of a failure after an initial incident. It can refer to a system or component that continues to fail despite corrective actions, or to human performance where a person misses a target again after a prior failure, signaling persistent underlying problems rather than a one-off mistake.

Etymology and usage: Refailure is a neologism formed from the prefix re- and the word failure. It is not yet standardized and appears primarily in technical discussions, postmortems, and problem-tracking contexts. It is sometimes used interchangeably with terms like repeat failure or recurrence of failure, but is often applied to emphasize the persistence or reappearance of a fault.

Contexts and examples: In software engineering, refailure can describe repeated outages after a patch, where the same root cause remains unresolved. In manufacturing, it may refer to the same defect appearing in production after a fix, indicating a new or undiscovered failure mode. In organizations, repeated missed targets after remediation efforts can be described as refailure, highlighting systemic issues beyond individual performance.

Causes: Common causes include incomplete root cause analysis, insufficient corrective actions, complex interdependencies that reintroduce the fault, and organizational or process changes that create new failure modes. Resource constraints and insufficient monitoring can also allow a failure to recur.

Impacts and mitigation: Refailure can raise downtime, cost, and risk exposure, while eroding trust in corrective processes. Mitigation focuses on thorough root-cause investigations, verification of fixes, systemic process changes, and enhanced monitoring to detect recurrence early. Measurement approaches include recurrence rate, time between failures, and improvements in mean time to failure after remediation.

See also: recurrence, failure analysis, reliability engineering, postmortem.