Firefighting is an emergency allocation of resources, required to deal with an unforeseen problem. In software development, for example, firefighting might involve assigning extra programmers to fix coding bugs that are discovered close to a product's release date; in a security context, it might involve allocating resources to deal with the breach of an information system or the outbreak of a computer virus. At the individual user level, firefighting might involve dealing with hardware or software problems that could have been prevented with basic computer maintenance practices.