Toward Systematizing Hot Fixing for Production Software

A hot fix is an unplanned improvement to a specific time-critical issue deployed to a system in production. This topic has never been surveyed within software engineering despite hot fixing being a long-standing and common activity. We present a preliminary overview of existing work on the topic. We find that practices around hot fixing are generally not systematized, and thus present an initial taxonomy of work found with ideas for future studies. We hope our work will drive research on hot fixing forward.

In Companion Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering