It used to be common that we would have two different ways to deploy something to a production environment.
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We would have the normal way, where everything went through a long testing cycle and there were checks and balances to ensure we weren’t going to break anything. It often took weeks to get through this path.
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Then there was the hot-fix approach where we tried to contain the change to the smallest possible thing and crossed our fingers that nothing would break. This allowed us to get to production almost immediately but it came with extremely high levels of risk. We’d just bypassed all of our checks and balances, after all.
I see far fewer companies relying on the high risk hot-fix approach today and that’s a significant win. We’ve largely done this through an increased focus on quality and through extensive automation of both testing and the build/deploy pipeline.
That results in the normal process to be sufficiently fast and reliable that there is no longer any need for hot-fixes.
If today, your company still can’t deploy a change to production both quickly and safely then it’s time to consider why that is.