Hot Fixing Software: A Comprehensive Review of Terminology, Techniques, and Applications

A hot fix is an improvement to a specific time-critical issue deployed to a software system in production. While hot fixing is an essential and common activity in software maintenance, it has never been surveyed as a research activity. Thus, such a review is long overdue. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review of work on hot fixing. We highlight the fields where this topic has been addressed, inconsistencies we identified in the terminology, gaps in the literature, and directions for future work. Our search concluded with 91 papers on the topic between the year 2000 and 2022. The papers found encompass many different research areas such as log analysis, runtime patching (also known as hot patching), and automated repair, as well as various application domains such as security, mobile, and video games. We find that there are many directions that can take hot fix research forward such as unifying existing terminology, establishing a benchmark set of hot fixes, researching costs and frequency of hot fixes, and researching the possibility of end-to-end automation of detection, mitigation, and propagation. We discuss these avenues in detail to inspire the community to systematize hot fixing as a software engineering activity. We hope that this paper streamlines the existing body of work and drives research in the area forward.