Summary
A Hot Fix change request happens when an issue arises that results in a customer site being considered down or if it affects their business operations to a huge degree. Implementing a Hot Fix is very disruptive to the normal flow of Bold’s development process and should be reserved as a last resort. Determining if an issue warrants resolving by a Hot Fix should be done through careful consideration of the following:
- Are signals being missed or lost because of this issue
- Is the customer being severely impacted in handling alarms in a timely fashion
- Is the issue something that will create significant damage to Bold’s reputation in the industry
- Will the Hot Fix carry more risk to the customer’s operations than the solution
Resolving this quickly is extremely important because the longer the issue is allowed to continue, the higher the damage to our reputation becomes. Even still, it is very important to be able to implement these Hot Fixes in a controlled and repeatable fashion. It should be possible to track every Hot Fix as well as completely reproduce the fix if needed. This requires that the process be documented and followed.
Initial Request Processing
Typically, these will be initiated by a problem that is brought to the support staff. This will usually involve support attempting to find a suitable work around first. If support is not able to resolve it, then the issue will be escalated to development departments. Sometimes this will come from other channels, but Development should consider the following to determine if this issue should be a candidate for a Hot Fix.
- Is the issue absolutely critical in nature?
- Are there any viable workarounds identified by development?
- Is the customer currently on the latest version and patch?
- Is this issue resolved with the latest version or patch?
- Do we adequately understand the problem, and can we define it clearly?
- Do we have a high level of confidence that we can resolve the issue with a Hot Fix?
If a determination is made to proceed, then the following steps in this process should be followed to provide consistency and traceability.
Hot Fix Steps
It is important not to skip these steps or to perform them out of order.
- Add a work item to the KanBan board
- Determine developer to work on this
- Place work item in the "Red Alert" swimlane on the board for maximum awareness
- Create Hot Fix solution
- Test Hot Fix in QA environment (if possible)
- Create HotFix document and artifacts in BoldWiki (Examples)
- Provide document link to support team
- Apply Hot Fix to site
- Conclusion Notification from support
- Make sure fix gets into Master quickly to ensure fix will be included in the next release.
- Cherry-pick into previous releases if necessary.
