The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 January 2023):
workaround
A temporary kluge used to bypass, mask
or otherwise avoid a bug or misfeature in some system.
Customers often find themselves living with workarounds for
long periods of time rather than getting a bug fix.
[Jargon File]
(1998-06-25)
The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):
workaround
n.
1. A temporary kluge used to bypass, mask, or otherwise avoid a bug or
misfeature in some system. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced
by fixes; in practice, customers often find themselves living with
workarounds for long periods of time. “The code died on NUL characters in
the input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces.” “That's not a fix,
that's a workaround!”
2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what some
currently non-working feature should do. Hypothetical example: “Using
META-F7 crashes the 4.43 build of Weemax, but as a workaround you can
type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete the remaining cruft by hand.”