Medicine has the term idiopathic cardiomyopathy. Cardiomyopathy means something is wrong with your heart, and idiopathic means "we have no idea why yours isn't working."
I know we have heisenbugs, bohrbugs, mandelbugs, and so on, but I feel I'm lacking one more buzzword: what's the IT cousin to idiopathic cardiomyopathy? What's an elegant word or phrase for "something unknown is wrong with this program"?
I use "stray photons".
"What went wrong with the build process?" "Stray photons."
Whenever someone asks, "What's wrong?", I always answer: User Error
I had this problem just today. Trying to debug a firmware problem the day before the device gets sent off for some bizarre environmental test. The chip would throw a bus error when a multi-vectored interrupt was triggered, but before the ISR was entered (that alone took three hours to figure out). No call stack information, no possible break points, no EPC saved before the exception... NOTHING. The IDE I have to use freezes periodically, and each time this happened I had about thirty seconds in which to diagnose it before a critical part of the device needed to be powered down. I almost threw my UltraSlow™ laptop (now with FreezePlus technology!) out the window (which is right next to a bus stop, so if I'd timed it right, who knows how far it could have gone?).
However, my boss would occasionally walk past, notice me wringing my hands (hair, face, oscilloscope probes...) and... very graciously keep walking, completely failing to ask me any questions about progress, and altogether forgetting about such things as impending deadlines and shipping dates.
My point is simply that if you're REALLY in that much trouble, you shouldn't need a word. You should be giving off the kind of vibe that suggests to anyone whose genes have survived any amount of natural selection: DO NOT DISTURB! If anyone asks you a dumb question, you're doing it wrong.
Alternatively, just rattle off "stack underflow" and saunter off to make a hot beverage while they're still going, "...huh?"
I think you are referring to the anti-pattern called Code Smell.
The software implementation is sub-optimal.
This suggests that it could be improved without overloading anyone with blame or too much detail. Too much detail is a sure way to annoy management who will think that you are trying to make trouble - or even worse, look smarter than them.
I would try to be plain and truthful and explain that I don't know for sure. I always try to explain what I do know and why that's not yet helped me reach a conclusion.
Also, I try to explain what I'm going to do next to try and track it down.
H2IK is a humorous take. Unfortunately, the expansion isn't always appropriate (e.g. with clients); hell if I know why, though.
You seem to like "idiopathic", so why not stick with it? "Idiopathic bug", "<something> is idiopathic", and so forth.
Some programs (cough *cough*) just leave an obscure error message.
Please don't follow them by saying error #(insert random number)
Instead, you should just cleanly tell the user that something unexpected happened. Windows 7 does it quite elegantly: it fades out the window and displays the message "This program has stopped working".
Alternatively, you can display a little box where the user can enter in what happened and send it to you (along with other debug info). You can also display a funny message to relieve the anger.
THE BUG
the user could read it as:
you just got THE BUG
what do you think?... and for developers, well... lets call it a simple bug :P
You could try a great moving and emotional error message, like :
This application will now stop because of compatibility issue with your computer. We tried to make it work, but we have to face it : we were not meant to be together. Please. Let us part, now.
Trying to create human compassion towards the machine CAN work (but most likely won't).