You know when you were younger (or if you’re me maybe just last week younger) and you broke something, so you hid it, or glued it, or turned it a certain way so no one would notice and you wouldn’t get in trouble? That’s kind of like a hot fix. Hot fixes tend to happen when a bug is discovered in prod that cannot wait to be fixed – it has to be fixed right away, and hopefully before any customers are impacted.

You do your best to test thoroughly and catch any issues prior to release, but you will never catch every single bug, and many times customers actually use the application differently, and depending on the steps you take, and the order, you can sometimes end up with different outcomes. I’ve had a hotfix happen when a customer did the exact same thing I tested, but instead of doing it in 4 steps, they took 10, and only their way was the bug happening. I literally had to go sit with customer support and have them walk me through exactly what the customer told them on the phone, step by step, and only then could I reproduce it.

Hot fixes tend to trump any other priority you’re working on, as they need to go out immediately, and can sometimes end up needing to have testing done quickly, so you’ll have to prioritize and know exactly what the code going out affects so you can test accordingly and efficiently. The hope is to get it out before there is much customer impact (like you did as a kid before you parents noticed what you broke), and to do it without introducing new bugs from being in a hurry.