A tiger team is “a team of specialists assembled to work on a specific goal.” A 1964 aerospace paper by J. R. Dempsey, W. A. Davis, A. S. Crossfield and Walter C. Williams used the term and defined it.
The paper described “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 or simulation.”