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

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of hot fixing in software engineering, highlighting terminology inconsistencies, research gaps, and future directions for automation and standardization.

Contribution

It is the first extensive survey on hot fixing, covering terminology, techniques, applications, and proposing future research directions.

Findings

Identified 91 relevant articles from 2000 to 2022.

Highlighted inconsistencies in hot fixing terminology.

Suggested future research on automation and benchmarking.

Abstract

A hot fix is an unplanned 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 articles on the topic between the years 2000 and 2022. The articles 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 many directions 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 deployment. We discuss these avenues in detail to inspire the community to systematize hot fixing as a software engineering activity.