Hot Patching Hot Fixes: Reflection and Perspectives

With our reliance on software continuously increasing, it is of utmost importance that it be reliable. However, complete prevention of bugs in live systems is unfortunately an impossible task due to time constraints, incomplete testing, and developers not having knowledge of the full stack. As a result, mitigating risks for systems in production through hot patching and hot fixing has become an integral part of software development. In this paper, we first give an overview of the terminology used in the literature for research on this topic. Subsequently, we build upon these findings and present our vision for an automated framework for predicting and mitigating critical software issues at runtime. Our framework combines hot patching and hot fixing research from multiple fields, in particular: software defect and vulnerability prediction, automated test generation and repair, as well as runtime patching. We hope that our vision inspires research collaboration between the different communities.