Hotfixes are different by nature.
- They are urgent, because production is already impacted.
- They are small, because the goal is to stop the bleeding, not redesign the system.
- They are high-risk, because they touch live systems under pressure.
- And they are high-impact, because even a one-line change can affect thousands or millions of users.
Yet many teams still apply exactly the same rules to:
- a large feature PR with weeks of context, and
- a one-line production fix at 2 AM during an incident.
This mismatch is where friction — and eventually policy violations — begin.
The “Tag to Skip Checks” Anti-Pattern
Most organizations already feel this pain, which is why a common workaround exists.
Teams introduce:
- labels like skip-ci, emergency, hotfix
- manual tags that disable required checks
- undocumented conventions known only to senior engineers
On paper, this looks like speed. In practice, it’s silent policy erosion.
Once skipping checks becomes normal:
- accountability drops
- audits become painful
- security teams lose trust in CI signals
- “emergency” becomes a habit, not an exception
The problem is not the desire for speed — it’s that tags remove guardrails instead of reshaping them.
2 Pipeline Checks
Most modern engineering systems today rely on a Git-based workflow, where even hotfixes are required to flow through Pull Requests (PRs). These PRs are protected by required checks that must succeed before a change can be merged. To avoid blocking urgent fixes, many organizations split validation into two deliberate stages.
Pre-merge checks: The first stage consists of pre-merge checks, which are intentionally fast and lightweight, focused on validating that the change does not immediately break tests or violate basic policies.
pre-checkin : Once these checks pass, developers are allowed to proceed with pre-checkin. A successful pre-checkin automatically merges the PR, removing manual delays while still ensuring that every hotfix follows a controlled, auditable path.
In most of the companies, to merge a change it is requried to successfully pass Pre-merge checks and pre-checkin check; For Hotfix changes to go in faster, Pre-merge checks can be made reliant by using Ruleset or branch protection rules.
What a Good Hotfix Ruleset Looks Like:
- pull request still required (no direct pushes)
- fewer, faster required checks (unit, smoke, secret scanning)
- approvals required, but limited to on-call / release owners
- force pushes still blocked
- bypass allowed only to a very small group, and always logged
Top comments (0)