hotfix
termprogrammingops culture
An urgent, narrowly scoped fix shipped outside the normal release cycle.
A hotfix trades process for speed: it skips the queue because something is on fire, which means it also skips much of the testing that normally catches side effects. The discipline that keeps hotfixes safe is merging them back into the mainline immediately, since the classic disaster is an emergency fix that quietly disappears in the next scheduled release and the outage returns.
Also known as: emergency fix, out-of-band patch