Ensuring best practices for emergency bug handling is critical, yet the process remains elusive in the industry. In our previous work, we conducted the first study on hot fixing industrial practices to gain initial insights. Through an online questionnaire, we surveyed 24 employees of Zühlke, a mid-sized IT company, and 136 software practitioners from a wide range of companies, roles, and geographical areas. While our original work revealed valuable initial insights into industrial hot fixing practices, it also surfaced inconsistencies across participant responses, particularly in terminology, automation levels, and process structure. This suggested that hot fixing workflows vary significantly depending on factors such as system maturity, application domain, and organizational context. To investigate this, in this paper, we explore the workflows of nine distinct project teams working with clients across a range of sectors at Zühlke through semi-structured interviews with their technical leads and senior software engineers. These interviews provide first-hand, context-rich accounts of hot fixing practices across domains to reveal bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. Together, our survey and case study results provide an empirically grounded view of hot fixing in practice, offering concrete recommendations for software engineering researchers and practitioners working to improve recovery workflows in production systems.
Hanna et al. (Sat,) studied this question.